Stranger in a strange land

As I wrote in last week’s post, my wife and I went to China for a week, specifically to Shanghai, Yiwu and Hangzhou. The trip was the exhilarating and exciting to all senses but left a foreign impression of China.

China is a multifaceted country. As tourists, each day we encountered worlds that we had never seen, each different from each other. In Shanghai, we sat in the cool, peaceful passages of the Yu Garden and were swept along with the mass of people and vehicles, two and four wheeled, to view the lighted buildings in the Bund, the Shanghai river district. We browsed the old-fashioned shops in the Pudong district in Shanghai, unchanged for hundreds of years, and poked our noses in only one building among the massive wholesale complex of the Futian International Trade City in Yiwu, the largest wholesale source of consumer products in the world. Our ears were assaulted by the sounds of the vegetable hawkers at a supermarket (see video below) and soothed by the silence of the tea fields above Long Jing village above Hangzhou. We enjoyed the tastes and smells of an elegant Chinese tea ceremony and encountered rather different ones as we strolled through the food booths at the Yiwunight market.  All this we did with the temperature ranging from 30 – 38 degrees and humidity no less than 90% and quite often even higher. As can be seen from this partial list, no day or even half day was the same in any sense.

China is a completely different country in another way also. When traveling in North America, Europe or even South America, tourists can somehow manage on their own. The locals know enough English or tourists can easily learn the local language to communicate basic ideas while the meanings of both street and store signs can be guestimated. Most cultural rules and norms in the West are similar enough to understand the rules of behavior and even blend in with the locals to one degree or another. The populations and governments accept and even facilitate tourism.

China is another story. The vast majority of Chinese do not know a single word of English, not to mention any other foreign language. Except for stores selling international brands, signs are generally in Chinese, inaccessible for most foreigners, including highway signs. Even "universal" tasks can be difficult. Ordering a meal or telling a taxi driver to go to your hotel is a challenge.  We ordered the same set of drinks from Starbucks three times and received three different pairs of beverages. Finding the "next" button in an overheated, asphyxiating ATM closed cubical is an experience that I will never forget. This inaccessibility goes beyond language. The Chinese have their own rich culture and do not need anybody else’s. The Chinese have their own way of doing many things, generally quite logical even if the logic is not immediately evident to a Western tourist. Even catching a train at the Shanghai Hongqiao train station, would be daunting for the unescorted or unitiated. 

This distance makes it necessary to have an intermediary, a guide of some type. We were lucky to be accompanied either by our daughter or our excellent guide, Aron Long. They opened up the window of China and allowed us to glimpse a tiny bit of China and its culture. The lonely planet hiker would find this country very intimidating and rather inaccessible.

 To make it clear, we had a wonderful, even amazing trip.  I do not regret a single moment and hope to return, albeit not in July. At the same time, I do even fantasize of living there because I could never be a part of Chinese society in any way even if I spoke and wrote Chinese. As Heinlein would way, I would always be a stranger in a strange land.

Travel jitters

I travel abroad every year, mainly to visit family and, more recently, to attend translation conferences.  A meaningful, often the most pleasurable, part of any trip, for better or worse, is the planning, expectations and gut feeling before departure. These often begin months before and slowly develop until suddenly, for me at least, thinking about the trip creates a certain emotional feeling.

This actual feeling can vary. Given that the reasons for my travel do not give me limited options on where I can go, I have experienced emotions ranging from dread to joy.  Prior to attending a conference in Bialystok, Poland, the birthplace of my grandmother, I felt very tense at the mere thought of going to Poland, probably because its legacy for the Jews.  In practice, the conference was excellent but Poland was indeed a complex experience for me emotionally as I saw bits of Poland of yesterday, today and tomorrow. I do not regret that trip at all but it was challenging in that sense.

I fly to LA twice a year.  My feelings about my city of birth have generally been highly negative but have now reached neutrality, a sort of progress.  I didn’t like the place when I was growing up nor do I do today.  However, I can somehow ignore it for two weeks during my parental visits. As Tom Lehrer said in the song National Brotherhood Week, be grateful that it does not last all year.

Last year, my wife and I attended a conference in Valencia, Spain. Aside from the worry on how I would cope with the Spanish, I expected the venue to be a fun place. I am fond of European cities, at least for short visits, and looked forward to the friendly atmosphere.  I was not disappointed.  Spain is indeed a warm country to visit in both meanings of the word. By the way, I coped with the Spanish with no problem thanks to my Italian.

France is my mother’s homeland and dear to my heart.  I lived there on and off for short period and have family there. Unfortunately, the last time I visited was some 9 years ago for my daughter’s bat mitzvah. The mere thought of visiting it sends me into extasy, then and now. My excitement for France may be more nostalgic than reality based but we are planning a long, trip to it once circumstances allow.

I am now flying to China to visit my wife’s daughter. Unfortunately, circumstances limit the trip to a week. So, I and my wife will get a taste of China, which I believe it will be a treat.  We have been told to be ready for a truly foreign experience in terms of way of life, manners, food, etc., unlike any place we have ever been. Psychologically, this trip will be the first time where I will be, as Heinlein wrote, a stranger in a strange land. This sentiment creates some anxiety but also quite a lot of excitement. I go with no concrete expectations apart from seeing the different.

I know that when I get on the train to go the airport, the reality of my upcoming trip will hit me, as always. These jitters are an essential part of the travel experience that I hope never to lose. They say that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. I cannot imagine not loving to visit new places.

Machine translation and Orwell

For many translators, machine translation is a combination of nuclear war and global warming. There is a sense that it will wipe them out from the map but they hope that it won’t happen in this generation. This week, I skimmed through two articles discussing MT. My thoughts were led not the future of the profession but to the future of English.

The first article, written by Florian Faes and cited by Slator in its weekly newsletter, discusses the linguistic differences between texts translated by MT as compared to human translation after editing. Among the writer’s conclusions, albeit on a limited literary sample, was MT texts tend to have a higher resemblance to their originals in terms of structure even when this structure differs in the target language as well be “simpler and more normalized”.

In another article, also cited by Slator, Jochen Hummel, the creator of the Trados computer assisted translation (CAT) tool, declared that his tool would no longer be used in the future but instead all human translation would be based on MT. In other words, the opus of previously written text will standardize our language. As I see it, what was will be in a much stronger form than today and subject to manipulation by corporate and governmental organization.

These two observations led me to recall Orwell’s 1984. For those who have forgotten or simply never read the book, he described a world where the government controlled everybody (Big Brother). Interestingly, one of its main tools was its control of language. English vocabulary had been reduced to the bare minimum. For example, a negative was expressed by adding “un” to the positive, e.g., unhungry. All texts were online (yes, this book was written 1949) and amended as political winds changed so that the public never had any proof of any change in policy or thinking. Looking at North Korea in 2019, Orwell would be appalled but not shocked.

Given that English is the dominant language of communication worldwide for the foreseeable future and assuming that machine language, however “artificial” it sounds initially, becomes the statistical and controlling norm, it is not hard to imagine a world in which people’s thoughts are expressed in intentionally simplified language and form. It would be undoing Dickens and Shakespeare, to name a few.

It is clear that MT has its place and will not disappear. It also clear that MT will have a huge influence on translation project management. Looking at the development of chat language, which is also simplified in many ways, it can be argued that this language is no less rich and individual. However, I still fear the gradual “poorification” of English not as a result of government action but instead due to industrial pressures.  I hope Orwell was wrong in this prediction and that 1984 will never come.

Dance accounting – Karmiel Dance Festival 2019

The Karmiel Dance Festival has come and gone. I was able to attend two performances, one being a potpourri of international troupes, whose actual names we were never mentioned. They came from Mexico, Brazil, Serbia, Turkey, Russian and China (as well a local group of Yemenite dancers). Each performed two dances. Like all good smorgasbords, while all came were good, I did not enjoy each one equally. The interesting aspect, in retrospect, is the reasons for my preferences.

The groups from Mexico and Brazil both performed long couple suites. The costumes were colorful and flowing while the music had a nice dancing pace. However, the dancers from Mexico were energetic and enthusiastic. Their faces expressed the joy they felt in dancing.  Couple dancing is fundamentally erotic foreplay.  In their case, I could imagine them celebrating the dance in private. By contrast, the Brazilian group seemed distant from the audience and each other, with a few exceptions.  In my mind, good dancing goes beyond technical skill and must involve getting into the spirit of the music.

Two Balkan (in the dance meaning of the word) dance groups appeared. As I have been dancing such dances for over 40 years, I can say that the Serbian and Turkish troupes were both very authentic in both costumes and style. Regarding the latter, the steps are small, precise and often quite quick, which is deceiving simple to execute. Yet, I had a strong preference for the Serbian group as their dancing felt as if it was genuinely being done in a small village by people who know each other and enjoy each other’s company. By contrast, the Turkish dance, whether because I am not fond of the sounds of traditional Turkish instruments or the steps are so understated, seemed flat and out of context to me. Traditional folk dancing is a social act, like going on a walk with friends, and should express that context.

The Chinese and Russian troupes were more theatrical and performed more choreographed and sophisticated dances. They were both quite skillful whether in terms of the ability to jump, float around the stage or control their hand movements. Still, I enjoyed the Chinese more than the Russian. The reason may be that it was more novel to me, never having really seen Chinese dance before, but I also enjoyed the image being represented, life in the spring, I think. Between the costumes and the movement, it took me away in some manner. The Russian dances involved the standard songs and steps made famous by the Red Army Orchestra.  The steps involve primarily physical skill but seem, maybe unfairly, a cliché. In my eyes, performance dancing must somehow open our eyes to something new.

None of the performances were poor.  Yet, I preferred those that expressed a spirit, context or idea. As they say in Hebrew, על טעם וריח אין להתווכח  [Al ta’am vereah ain lehitvakei’ah], which means you can’t argue with taste and smell, or French, chacun à son gout; in short, in dancing, there is no accounting for taste, even if I try to understand my own.