Shang High Life, #3

Shang High Life, #3 July 23, 2001 That’s What I Meant I Said It’s fun to be condescending. It must be. I’m so damn good at it, which means I must have practiced a lot. But don’t go getting all judgmental on me. You do it, too. For instance: laughing at the way Asians translate things into English. Stay with me. I ain’t goin’ where you think I’m goin’. Not at first, anyway. For a long time, I’ve had this real strong opinion about ex-pats and others who are incredulous at outrageous mis-translations. Clearly buffoons and boors. No question. I mean, how about a little gratitude that the barbarians are trying to use your language, Chucky! How much Mandarin do *you* speak? Facilitating this attitude, I have a cute nose, all the better with which to look down on other cultural imperialists. And, if a squirly look and snarly grumble don’t set ‘em to heel, all you have to do is mention examples of how royally we righteous Anglophones bugger it up when we deign to translate our bon-est of bon mots into the local clatter. The best stories, apocryphal or not, come from the advertising industry. Personal favorites include Kentucky Fried Chicken translating “Finger lickin’ good” into Chinese as “So good you’ll chew your fingers off.” Better still, GE’s “We bring good things to life” arriving in Mandarin as “We bring your ancestors back from the dead.” Charming. Plenty of ammunition to shoot down those jocularly indignant monoglots who giggle at the sincere attempts of locals to make life easier for them. But goddamn if I haven’t become one of them. It just doesn’t matter how grateful I am that the Shanghainese pull out all the stops to translate for me. The ways they get it wrong are just too damn funny not to indulge a guilty giggle. The joke is on us, of course. The reason the translations are funny, often, is that they come so close to being right. The tiny ways in which they’re wrong reveal our language naked, wobbly and very strange, indeed. English is so screwed up with inconsistencies, exceptions, and the most inexplicable idioms, it’s like a test designed specifically to drive its taker batty. (Sic, ibid, op cit, yadda yadda.) So, no wonder you get sentences like “Free tea and one person!” But that’s kindergarten stuff. I like ‘em best when they’re so close you have to look twice. How about: “The natural sights are the unchangeable green window scenes.” Huh? Oh, I get it. Or, “Equipments of international brands shape out the spacious place with entire fitment.” I mean, these guys are GOOD! I reckon they’d translate a newspaper story and make it sound like Wordsworth on shrooms. “There is no limit of complexion or bloodline in our feelings toward fashion and our understandings of life art.” Damn. Translation is a whole lot funkier than I usually think about, because language isn’t the only hurdle to clear. There’s the issue of what the words mean, sure, but there’s also the question of whether a native English speaker would have ever said that in the first place. (For an elephantine exegesis of this and other minutiae of the zany world of translation, check out Douglas Hofstadter’s *Le Ton Beau de Marot*. Ponderous, but stunning.) So, you see elegant translations like the following almost everywhere: “Such a lively and inspired air is spreading entrancingly over the restaurant.” Or, my personal favorite, which I hear almost every morning when I jump into a taxi, automated in the voice of a young woman: “Hello, dear passenger. I welcome you to Huang Xin taxi with all my heart, and I hope you have the most pleasant of journeys.” . . . at which point, you’re ready for her to take you on a ride to pretty much an-y-where. But that’s just charming cross-cultural serendipity, rather than botched translation. I still like it when the words are just wrong, even if it’s subtle. Like the ad I saw for a restaurant with a newly revamped menu. The point of the ad, I think, was that the new menu was so wonderful, so surprisingly, yummily fantastic, that you would hardly believe your gustatory senses. The headline trumpeted: “Stomach shocker!” I save my highest regard, however, the place of greatest honor, for the less gifted translators. They don’t speak much English, but they give it their best. These are the unsung heroes of the battle to bridge cultural and linguistic divides. Unsung, because they couldn’t find the battlefield, but they went down shooting, anyway. In my journey to date, the best monument to these courageous souls was painted in very large letters on the window of a restaurant near the Hilton. In the hope of attracting foreign guests from the foreign hotel, these foreign words were there left, crying out the restaurant’s best qualities as a beacon to passersby. They read: “Take a horn style. Self-conscious would be.” * * * PS: Something I forgot to mention in both previous notes… Before I left LA, something happened that meant a whole lot to me. It also taught me one of those lessons that I’d already learned about forty-three times, but was worth having knocked into me again. One of my best mates on the planet, Bill Stuart (also known as “Doctor Bill”, “Beverly Bill”, “Shinehead Willy” and “Big Lovin’ Easy Bake Oven”) and I had been meaning to get together ever since I moved back to the US from Australia. It hadn’t happened, mostly because of me. When I called Bill to tell him I was Shang-high-tailin’ it out of California, just about the next words out of his mouth were, “Well, son, what’d be the best dates between now and then for me to fly out to LA?” So, in the middle of me packing and carrying on, Bill came just to visit a spell. We ate Mexican food. We saw movies. We walked up and down the stars of Hollywood Boulevard. But mostly we just hung out in close proximity to each other the way folks that love one another ought to do more often than they might get the chance. Oh, and we rode rollercoasters. In the choice between cute theme park versus lots of really big coasters, we chose to follow our testosterone. And our testosterone got a real treat. We ended up at Magic Mountain on a very hot Wednesday: mid-week, just as a few high schools and colleges let go for the summer. Almost no-one in the park, but half of those there were wearing their new bikinis. I don’t know how many times we rode that damn river flume thing that soaks nubile co-eds to within a transluscent lycra fiber’s width of two fast-approaching-middle-aged men. But, however many times we did, it didn’t get old. In fact, I’d swear it made me and Bill a whole lot younger. Thanks, Easy Bake. You keep teachin’ me.