Archive for the 'Wordwatch' Category

All you word lovers and Scrabble players out there will love the Free Rice Game, if you haven’t already become totally addicted to this online game.

It’s a vocabulary quiz with an altruistic twist. For every homonym you get right, the site donates 10 grains of rice to help end world hunger. So far, since 12 November, they’ve doanted 1.5 billion grains fo rice.

Enjoy! (click on the pic below to be taken to the Free Rice site)

Hmm, I got stuck on the question above. Can anyone help - without using a dictionary?

I have to confess that I’m a secret Country & Western fan. Every time I listen to Loretta Lynne’s Coal Miners Daughter or Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colours, I succumb to the sentimental twangs of the guitars and the heart-warming heroism of the poor but plucky families in those autobiographical songs. Tears well up and before long, I’m sobbing into my sleeve.

It strikes me that many C&W songs are about “them good ol’ days when we was po’ but we was happy”. And it’s not just in the family saga songs. There are the songs where even though the narrator is now rich and successful, he/ she and their lover now don’t get on but way back when, back when they was strugglin’ to make ends meet - now those were the good times.

Also, many C&W songs evoke the rugged, lonely and mythical American landscape with their use of US placenames to give a sense of location. Think of Phoenix, San Francisco, Aspen, Denver, Jackson, Tennessee - these are all places I learnt about from listening to C&W songs as a kid in Malaysia.

It occurred to me that you don’t get many Asian songs about “how great it was when we was poor”. Nor are there many international hits that involve lines like “By the time I get to Johore Bahru, you’ll be waking” or “I left my heart in Penang”….

So, to redress the balance, I had a go at writing a Country & Eastern song, which I’ve called “The Ballad of the Lonesome Accountant.”

Imagine some steel string, twangy guitars and a gravelly, mournful Hank Williams sound.

I was raised up in Mud Valley*
Right beside the River Klang
We didn’t have much money
Nor much of any thang.

My mom, she fried hot noodles,
Spicy char kway teow,
Every day in Chow Kit Market,
With hardship on her brow.

My dad, he drove a fancy car
For a big time Mr Boss.
We never made much profit,
Only pockets full of loss.

Chorus:

I watch the cars fly out of town
From our porch by the Gombak freeway.
I dreamt of riches and big houses
And escaping far away.
I dream I’m a fancy accountant,
Driving, driving in my car.
I drive all through the highways
And I’m really getting far.

So I worked hard at my studies,
Gave my life up to my school.
Didn’t do no drugs nor liquor,
Nor girls nor played the fool.

And I got a job in business,
Got me some buy-to-lets.
Made a lot of profit
And paid of all our debts.

I bought my mom a great big house
And she sips martinis now,
While days of ladies lunching
Wipe the hardship from her brow.

I bought my dad a fancy car
And now he’s a big time Mr Boss.
He runs things all for profit
And never makes a loss.

I don’t have time to spend with them.
My wife and kids don’t know me.
They go shopping in the fancy malls
Living it up with my money.

Chorus:

I watch the cars fly out of town
From my Porsche on the freeway.
I see my riches and big houses
And my heart is far away.
I’m just a lonesome accountant
Driving, driving in my car.
I drive all through the highway
But am I getting far?

I wish for days so long ago
When my mom laughed out loud
At her stall in Chow Kit Market
And dad’s kindness made me proud.

I wish my wife would look at me
With eyes and heart aflame
And my kids could learn to love
More than just computer games.

Chorus:

I watch the cars fly out of town
From my Porsche on the freeway.
I see my riches and big houses
And I’m escaping far away.
I’m just a lonesome accountant
Driving, driving in my car.
I drive all through the highways
And I’m going very far.

I drive all through the highways
And I’m going very far.
Going, going, going very far.

All it needs now is for someone to set it to music and sing it for us! Any offers?

*Kuala Lumpur means “the muddy meeting place of two rivers”

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Photo: of line dancing in Singapore, thanks to csc.gov.sg

PS. Come back on Monday for some videos of other Asian C&W fans doing their thang ….

Reuters reports that according to research done by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, most of the 1.3 billion people in China share only 1000 surnames. At least 100,000 people share the name “Wang Tao”, for example. The report states:

“Police in China, where most of the 1.3 billion people share just 100 surnames, are considering rules which would combine both parents’ family names to prevent so much duplication, state media said on Tuesday.

The report gave no details of the Public Security Ministry’s motives for seeking the change, but use of so few names by so many often sows confusion and must presumably hamper police work.”

My surname Ooi is very unusual and strange in the UK. There are probably only a handful of us in the phone books - and three of those would be me, my brother and sister. It’s difficult for Westerners to pronounce and they can never believe it when I spell it for them that it’s all vowels only. I’ve been variously called “Oi”/ “Oy”/ “Doi” and of course, double-oh-one.

But in Malaysia, it’s a fairly common name - and no doubt, it is pretty common in China, too. When my British friends have come to visit in Malaysia, they are always surprised to see Ooi all over the place.

The Chinese pictorial diagram for it is “yellow” so it’s the same surname as Wong or Wang or Whang and they are all pronounced differently because they are different dialects of Chinese.

So over in the West, I have the fantasy of thinking of myself as rather unique but I’m not really, of course!

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I came across a post on BoingBong which collects together strange names of towns suck as Fucking in Australia and Dildo in Newfoundland - read more here.

Our most common response to such words is shock, horror and giggling. Some people use it regularly to indicate their subversiveness. Others because they are angry and these words seem to represent the extreme of verbal aggression.

In the recent Big Brother racist row, there was a huge hoo-ha when the Indian actress was allegedly called a “Paki”. In trying to defuse the situation, the TV producers confirmed she was actually called a “cunt”. The message seems to be: A racist slur is evil but a misogynistic one is fine and dandy….??!

All this talk of provocative/ abusive language reminded me of a 78 page academic paper by a law professor, Christopher Fairman, on the legal implications of the word fuck, simply entitled “Fuck”. You can download the whole treatise from Stanford Law School here. Or read a summary on the Social Sciences Research Network here. He analyses the impact of the word in different contexts and why it raises such a kerfuffle. A fascinating read if you have the stamina for all 78 pages!

Photo: thanks to blo#gstream.com

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Over the Xmas holidays, I was reminded of how people in the old days would sit round and listen to the wireless. In the early days of radio, that gadget became the centrepiece of many living rooms, often built in wood and some of them quite magnificent pieces of furniture in themselves. It was the medium through which everyone got their news, drama and music.

Then TV came along and families re-arranged the furniture so they could watch the TV screen. The wireless became more portable and evolved into common speech as the radio.

We found ourselves over the Xmas holidays listening to the wireless again. Sometimes, you don’t want to watch telly and you don’t fancy listening to CDs. The wireless connects you to the wider world with music interspersed with voice and news bulletins. You can go about your business around the house and still stay connected to the outside world.

Yes, we were listening to the wireless, not the radio. Life has come full circle and the wireless is back - but in a different form. With wireless broadband in my home, I can tune in to radio stations via the internet but instead of listening to a huge piece of wooden furniture in one room, I can listen to it in any room where I have a laptop or computer (and being a gadget freak, I have many of those everywhere!). But sometimes, we find ourselves in the living room, sitting on the sofa and gathered round the wireless laptop - a curious re-enaction of the old days when people would sit on the sofa gathered around a crackling wooden box!

I love internet radio - there are no adverts if you choose your station carefully and in some cases, you can listen on-demand and not whatever the station is streaming live at any given time. For speech radio, I am a great fan of the BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4 and Radio Australia. Radio Australia has fascinating documentaries on the Asia-Pacific region and its Rural Reporter series is a great for getting a taste of the Outback while it’s raining in my London suburb! For music, I singalong to 3C, a UK country and western channel, chill to Chill and sizzle to theJazz while for more rowdy moods, I’ve recently discovered Planet Rock, the Arrow and Virgin Xtreme.

I’ve tried looking for Malaysian and Singapore stations but the ones I’ve come across don’t seem to have a 24 hour internet presence or on-demand listening. If anyone can guide me to any stations in that region that I could enjoy on the wireless, do let me know.

Photo: thanks to image-ination

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I’m delighted to post an article written specially for Fusion View by translator Nicky Harman about the current Chinese to English translation she is working on and the process of translating literature of one culture into another.

I invited Nicky to write this piece because I wanted to learn more about the process of translation. In particular - and rather embarrassingly - I do not read Chinese at all and can only manage a smattering of broken Cantonese. My French is miles better! I suppose it’s to do with having grown up speaking and reading English and then being over in the UK where I only ever use English - and a bit of French. So it’s especially interesting for me to meet an English person who is fluent in Chinese, which should be my mother tongue but isn’t!

With a couple of well-received transations to her name and a prestigous award from PEN, Nicky is looking for a literary agent to represent her new work “Striking Root”, a translation of Nanjing-born poet Han Dong’s first novel - so if you know anyone who might be right for her project, please contact me (by clicking on “Email Me” in the sidebar) and I will forward your email to Nicky.

Nicky writes:

I teach translation on a multi-lingual MSc (Masters) course at Imperial College London, and have special responsibility for teaching the Chinese to English and Spanish to English groups, and teaching translation technology tools. My chief love, however, is Chinese to English literary translation, and this I do in my spare time.

Striking Root

I have just completed a beautiful first novel by Nanjing-born poet HAN Dong. It’s called Striking Root, and is an account of a family sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Many Chinese writers have taken the Cultural Revolution as their theme, and much of their work makes painful reading. Han Dong’s book is different: it is written with great delicacy and wit, and somehow manages to convey the complexity of life during this momentous decade – the tragedy, the cruelty and the humour – in its description of the struggles of very ordinary people to make a decent life for themselves in extreme circumstances. I won an American PEN award for part of the translation, and have had chapters published in literary journals, but like all good books, this one works as a whole, and now I need a literary agent or a publisher who will take it on. Why this book? This was one suggested by a Chinese friend: it won a national literary prize in China. I believe it has a universal appeal.

Country Life in China

The book I translated before that was also set in the Chinese countryside, but China Along the Yellow River is non-fiction. The author, CAO Jinqing, is a sociologist and writes about the lives of country people in the 1990s. Dull? Not at all. Professor Cao is marvellous writer, with an insatiable curiosity about the lives of his interviewees. The book was first published as an academic hardbook (very pricy), but has now appeared as a rather more affordable Routledge paperback.

Racy Love Affair

The first full-length novel I translated was K – The Art of Love by Hong Ying, a marvellously racy and vivid fictionalised account of a love affair between a real-life Englishman teaching in Wuhan in the 1930s, and the wife of his head of department.

Chinese for Fun…?

I always loved languages, and when I was in my teens, I thought it would be fun to learn Chinese. I’m sometimes not sure that ‘fun’ is quite the right word! (Peering at characters is ruinous to the eyesight!). However, I was lucky enough to be able to do a university degree in Chinese, and I have never regretted it. In fact, every time I pick up a book in Chinese, I feel enormously privileged to be able to read it, to have a window into that world.

Chinese novels

Since the mid-1980s there has been an explosion of fictional writing in Chinese (I’m talking about mainland China, simply because that’s what I know most about). So much is being written in Chinese, covering such a vast range of topics and styles that it is hard to have a comprehensive understanding of what is going on. I know what I like, I suppose you could say – and I rely on Chinese friends suggesting books that they have enjoyed. I love some of the modern detective novels, for instance …. If only English readers and publishers knew how good they are!

The process of translation

Translation is a sort of partnership with the author, quite a different process from creative writing, and yet wonderfully creative in its own way - the process of conveying a work from one language that you love into another language that you love is a most satisfying one. So as a translator, you have to really want to make your book available to English readers. That’s the emotional bit. But you have to use your head too, or perhaps I should say, your ears. Your readership is important too. How does what you have written sound to them? Does it read as you imagine your author would want it to read, if he or she had written in English? Being a good translator means imagining yourself as the author, and as the reader too.

Chinese is a very different language from English, and describes a very different culture. That makes the translator’s work especially difficult. For example, people in China are often referred to by their job title and surname, where in English they would be called by their surname or first name. So shall we call ‘Teacher Wang’, Ms/Mr Wang in English? Or Teacher Wang (which will take a bit of getting used to as it sounds ‘foreign’ but is what the original Chinese says)? Do we translate Chinese characters meaning ‘father’s sister’ (as opposed to mother’s sister) simply as ‘aunt’? or should we be more specific? There are stylistic differences as well as cultural differences: Chinese writers sometimes add emphasis to their text by means of repetition. In English, we tend to prefer understatement, to add emphasis by choice of words or phrases, and to avoid repetition. These are just a few short examples – I could write much, much more about what is a fascinating process!

Ideally, I like to discuss my translations with a Chinese person who has good English and an interest in translation. That person may be the author, or may be someone else who agrees to check my work for me. I actually enjoy that form of collaboration, and find it very rewarding.

I have never translated into Chinese, as my written Chinese is not good enough. One of the rewards of translating into ones native language is having at ones command all that deep knowledge and life-long experience of ones native language.

Written by Guestblogger: Nicky Harman

Photo: of Nicky, thanks to Imperial College; of Han Dong & Striking Root Chinese book cover thanks to books.sina.com

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We’ve been having a great discussion about language and identity on Fusion View recently, with a number of comments from American and European perspectives as well as the East/ West view. I’ve also featured the longer comment by Matthew G on how being bi-lingual in English and Japanese brings out different aspects of his personality.

I had all these thoughts present in my mind this week when we went out to eat in London and found ourselves yet again having an extortionately expensive and depressingly untasty meal. It’s tiring to have one’s tastebuds dismayed and one’s wallet emptied so many times in London. It’s not just English food I’m feeling grumpy about - it’s cuisine from anywhere in the world served up in England, and specifically London. Perhaps in London and the high rents and a sense that the city is so huge that you don’t really have to offer great food, there’ll be enough people coming along to keep your restaurant afloat. Or perhaps it’s a state of mind.

When talking about food in Chinese, we have the word “heong”, which has no direct translation into English. In my mind, it means a combination of tasty, delicious, aromatic and lip-smacking. The taste occurs in the nose and palate as well as just the tongue. It involves more than just a taste like salty or sour or sweet - there are flavours and aromas and scents that happen as you chew and savour your mouthful. Sometimes, it’s about fried garlic or caramelized soy sauce or coriander or any other spice and other times it’s just about the aroma and flavour of whatever is the essence of the dish emerging.

I think it’s significant that there is no direct equivalent word or direct translation of this concept in English. If you don’t get the concept, how can you get the thing itself?

So if no-one around you cares about food being “heong”, why bother to try and create that experience for them just as a matter of course?

It is of course not true to say that all restaurants in England are awful and I am not saying that at all. I just think that there are a great many that are outrageously priced for the kind of tasteless dishes they offer up and it takes a lot of effort to find a good reasonably priced restaurant in England. In Malaysia, you can go to any road side stall run by someone from the back of their motorbike and have a really yummy laksa or fried noodles or satay for the equivalent of 50p. People expect their food to be “heong”, even at that end of the spectrum. Sigh. I feel very homesick for some “heong” food right now!

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The Guardian first book prize has gone to Chinese-born author YiYun Li who has only recently learnt to write in English. This is very exciting. She won it for her short story collection “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers”. Her stories have been described as “perfect and complete capsules” and one of the judges of the prize speaks of her as “a writer of rare perceptiveness and originality”. She has already won the Frank O’Connor international short story prize and the PEN/Hemingway award. Wow!

You can read the full article in The Guardian here.

I was taken by the samples of Li’s writing that the Guardian article gives:

“Li’s stories, the longest of them 24 pages, exploit the ability of the short form to register fine shifts in everyday lives. The background events that shape the people she writes about are the imperial centuries of feudalism, Mao’s communism and cultural revolution, Tiananmen Square and the plunge into capitalism.

In their speech, new half-poetical sayings mix with old proverbs: “a dew-marriage before the sunrise” (a one-night stand); “There is always a road when you get into the mountain” [see extract]; and, poignantly, in the same story, “The happiness of love is a shooting meteor. The pain of love is the darkness following.” “

I wonder if the influence of her mother tongue, Chinese, has blurred over into her use of English thus creating these powerfully evocative images. I have been exploring the issue of identity and language and even dialect in this blog, with thought-provoking contributions from commentors and guest-bloggers. We’ve looked at how our core selves may be formed by whether we speak English or Japanese and how one might change like a chameleon depending on whether one speaks standard American or working-class / regional American. Now, these examples of Li’s writing make me curious as to how the writing of multi-lingual writers is enriched by their many tongues.

The dense, intense writing of Joseph Conrad comes to mind. He made fictions from his experiences in Malaya and the Far East and Africa, having served as a merchant seaman. He was Polish originally, I believe, but wrote in English and is studied as a major figure in English literature. The intensity and power of his writing can in part, I think, be attributed to his writing in a language that was not his mother tongue.

Do you have any personal experience of this question as a writer? Or perhaps as a reader, certain phrases from books strike you - could those idioms come from the book’s author’s multi-lingual life?

Please add a comment or email me. I will post the most relevant and interesting contributions as individual Guestblog writings for Fusion View.

You can find out more about Li at her homepage www.yiyunli.com

Photo: thanks from Li’s homepage

There’s been a flurry of comments in the last few days and I haven’t had a chance to respond to all of them. Some of them are quite thought provoking so I thought I’d highlight them all in a post.

First, thanks to yeeton for your helpful factual corrections on planes and the Canadian constitution.

My Great-Uncle Jackie has also visited to listen to the podcast of his eldest brother, my Grandfather telling the story of our family. He says, “He (Grandfather) sounds wonderful… just like the good ole days.”

There’ve been three comments on my podcast about my Two Voices. Mika, who is Japanese, pokes a little fun at herself and her effort to speak English. David, who is English, is reminded of how he had to learn to switch from “army speak” (ie lots of swearing) to “civvy speak” (more genteel polite language) with his family at home. Jennifer, who is American I believe, describes how she has learnt to switch from her higher-education voice to her working class voice as she moves between her working life and her family. I am fascinated by these stories of two voices within what seems to my eye a single linguistic culture ie English-English and American-American. In particular, to my ear, all American voices sound the same - except for the exaggerated elongated vowels of the Deep South that one hears in cowboy songs and movies. I am going to ask Jennifer if she will do a longer guest post for us to tell us more about her two voices and I hope she will agree.

Jennifer also comments on the unavailable video of the Star Trek mash-up and the conflict between copyright and the wide enjoyment of artistic endeavours. My view is that these mash-ups and parodies and excerpts that are put out on the web are done by fans who want to share their passion for a particular movie or show. I say: what a great way of free advertising and marketing for the originator of that movie or show. The free viewings on the web don’t take a piece of the pie from the film etc - in fact, it increases people’s interest in the real thing. Take the ad for Molson beer that’s several years old, where Joe talks proudly about being Canadian - it is parodied by William Shatner (who of course himself is parodied in the Star Trek mash-up). Its being shown on YouTube raises millions of people’s awareness of the brand all over the world and not just Canada - a wider audience, I bet, than the original audience numbers when the ad was first aired on Canadian TV. The parody of it by William Shatner does the same, by making people go and seek out the Molson ad that it parodies. So Molson should be overjoyed about the ad being shown on YouTube rather than insisting on it being removed from this free viewing platform.

I also got a visit from Jim, the Grey Surfer I featured. I just love the weaving of the web and how so many connections can be made through comments and links with a diverse range of people who share one thing - the passion to communicate.

And speaking of oldies who blog, my Dad’s post on Memories of Malaya have been very popular. The most recent comment was from Khairudin, another young guy, this time in Singapore. It’s great that blogging seems to be reaching out across the generations.

Pey and Lydia, two Malaysians, have taken part in my Book Lovers Poll - and hopefully, they attest against the statement I heard that Malaysians only read 2 books a year. If you haven’t yet taken the poll, you can do so now by going to the blue box in the sidebar on the right. It’s anonymous and takes only one click, so please do take part!

And I must thank Pey for expanding on my post about the use of “-lah” in Malaysian English. It’s all about tone. So if I were to try to cajole you in Malaysian English to take the Book Lovers Poll, I would say, “Go on-lah. Takes only a second. Just for fun only-wat. Do the poll-lah.” “Wat”? What’s “wat”? That’s another cajoling noise like “-lah”: it just felt natural to put it there!

So this post is a bit of a chop-suey (English version of Chinese for mixed vegetables!) or campur-campur (Malay for mixed bag) but I wanted to thank everyone who left a comment and also highlight some of the comments that made me stop and think.

Working on the Malaysian English of my third novel has made me think about that peculiarly Malaysian word “-lah”. It’s not really a word, I suppose - more a suffix used from time to time in colloquial Malaysian English as an emphasiser. “-Lah” is used only in Malaysia, as far as I know.

There’s a great entry in Wikipedia about Malaysian English with a section on the use of “-lah”. The entry implies that it derives from Chinese rather than Malay, although there is a suffix “-lah” used in Malay. I believe that the usage and context of the sound in Malay and Malaysian English are different - the “-lah” of Malay is a grammatical element that is integral to the language whereas “-lah” in Malaysian English can be dropped without changing the meaning. This is my lay person’s understanding - if there are any linguists or academics out there who would like to comment or deepen our understanding on this point, please do add a comment!

There’s also long discourse on Malaysian English - aka Manglish to afficionados - at Malaysia Uncut.

I speak in Manglish with my family and Malaysian friends and happily slip into “-lah” this and “-lah” that. If an English friend is also present, I can switch to full English English in the same breath as I turn towards them. My English friends who have visited Malaysia use “-lah” when remembering the fun times they had on their visits - but it sounds weird when tacked onto a proper English English sentence!

I’d love to hear from Malaysians living in Malaysia or abroad about your emotional connection with “-lah” and/ or Malaysian English. And also any migrants to Malaysia from other English speaking countries - have you got the hang of Lah-Lah land?

Photo: thanks to gamleys .co.uk