China’s rich cultural history demands world recognition, serving as an avenue for exchange and communication, with translation at the heart of the issue. Luo Weiteng reports from Hong Kong.

Since China’s first AAA, or Triple-A, video game Black Myth: Wukong, took the global gaming community by storm, veteran gamer Ma Yuexin has played the smash hit multiple times, hoping it will never end.

Many a time, the 30-year-old Beijing native has set the text language to English to start again in a fitting tribute to the brave efforts the game has made in calling terms with indigenous Chinese roots by their proper names.

“The pinyin-based linguistic choices for loong instead of dragon, yaoguai for monster, and Sun Wukong instead of Son Goku show due respect for aesthetics and the essence of Chinese culture,” says Ma, referring to the Japanese name for Monkey King, popularized in the animation series Dragon Ball Z.

Despite the intricate balance required between cultural authenticity and the ease of understanding, Ma has seen many terms with strong Chinese cultural, historical and philosophical elements yet be accepted in their original names when anglicized.

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He points to a YouTube video from a famous traditional instrumental ensemble in China, featuring the Chinese Kunqu Opera masterpiece The Peony Pavilion, with playwright Tang Xianzu (1550-1616) of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) introduced as the “Oriental Shakespeare”.

“Referring to Tang Xianzu as the Oriental Shakespeare diminishes his body of work and reinforces stereotypes that Eastern arts are inferior to their Western counterparts,” Ma says. “Comparing these two is like comparing apples to oranges. They employ entirely different styles and techniques.”

There is also the Chinese folk tale of the tragic love between Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai (also known as The Butterfly Lovers in the West), which is often called China’s legendary Romeo and Juliet love story.

In a similar vein, several time-honored cities and water towns in the Jiangnan area of China, notably Suzhou and Wuzhen, have earned the nickname “Venice of the East”. The list goes on with many translations bearing the imprint of the times when China lagged in building up its own soft-power assets.

Revealing true colors

“You may call it the product of the age as many household names and cultural symbols at home were less recognizable abroad in those days,” notes Janice Pan Jun, professor and director of the Academy of Language and Culture at Hong Kong Baptist University.

“However, with the advent of information technology, cultural icons like Tang Xianzu are by no means Mr Nobody among today’s global audience. Sticking to the old practice of translation fails to do justice to either China’s greatest playwright or the audience’s IQ,” she says.

Pan cites the Skopos theory that suggests the primary focus of a translation should be its purpose, with the specific aim of determining the strategies used in translation. “The highest realm of translation is making translators understood as if communicating in the context of the audience’s native languages,” she says, adding she would instead introduce Tang Xianzu as China’s highly revered playwright, sharing the same renown that Shakespeare does in the West.  

“It does take time and concerted efforts to accept Tang Xianzu as he is,” says veteran interpreter and translator Shen Youzhi, stressing there is “no shortage of people, even those at the forefront of spreading our culture to the world, who simply regard telling China’s stories well as a matter of converting stories written in Chinese into foreign languages”.

But she says top-down change never happens overnight. An up-to-date, culture-specific lexicon requires industries and the public to join forces.

Citing baijiu, Shen recalls that when the China Alcoholic Drinks Association adopted the industry’s terminology in 2019, the name for this national drink was translated in a freewheeling manner. With industry associations and academics calling for standardized translation in international journals, the term baijiu came to the fore. But it took another two years for the General Administration of Customs and the CADA to reach a consensus.

The behind-the-scenes story of baijiu offers a glimpse into the difficulties and collective endeavors necessary for a major change of translation that would make a big difference. “As Chinese culture is due its time in the global spotlight, translation is far from being a trivial matter that’s not worth fighting for,” says Shen. “It’s imperative that for translation to be taken seriously, it has much to do with the right to define cultural narratives in a global game of discourse power.”

Looking for the right way

However, at a time of uncertainty, chaos, complexity and ambiguity, a cultural issue can easily become contentious. The naming of Hong Kong’s Xiqu Centre in the West Kowloon Cultural District, dedicated to promoting the heritage art of Chinese opera, sparked controversy. Adopting the term xiqu, based on Putonghua, instead of the commonly used opera or the relevant Cantonese translation — hei kuk, touched a raw nerve in the community.

“The naming hinged on the substance of the art form. The term xiqu has been used in both the artistic and academic fields for decades,” then-secretary for home affairs Lau Kong-wah told a lawmaker who questioned the rendering of the English name for the facility opened in 2019, adding that the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority had been using the working title Xiqu Centre for the proposed venue since the authority’s establishment in 2008.

Indeed, xiqu has been preferred to Chinese opera among academic and artistic professional groups as one of the oldest dramatic art forms in the world, and one that has been in use for over 1,000 years. It varies radically from the lineage of opera in the West, tracing its origins to 17th-century Italy, according to Louis Yu Kwok-lit, WKCDA’s former executive director of performing arts.

Opposing voices raised concerns over xiqu not being readily comprehensible to audiences from different cultural backgrounds. Cheng Pei-kai, chairman of the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Association Hong Kong branch, however, brushes aside such worries. “Just as how Japan’s Noh and Kabuki become familiar to an international audience, the more xiqu is used, the better it will be known worldwide in the long run.”

What matters most, Cheng points out, is whether translations convey the cultural essence and depth. “Translation, at its core, is a transformation and transmission of a cultural message.”

Cheng and Pan view xiqu, Chinese opera and hei kuk as feasible options although the latter two either fail to capture the whole picture of this art form, or suit only a geographically specific audience.

No more trade-offs

“A common root cause lies in the absence of a single universal English term, breeding confusion,” notes Shen. “Overarching concern about the barrier of understanding has long been on the lips of cultural practitioners, and this is where a trade-off starts.”

“Many generally accepted translations, judging by present-day criteria, are compromises at the expense of a unique identity born with the underlying words. They may fit in with conventional or, more precisely, Western practices but fall behind the changing times,” says Shen, clamoring for a leap of faith to buck convention.

Countries in Asia are breaking away from conventional styles to reinforce their identity and diversity in a game of discourse power. In 2019, the Japanese government pressed ahead with the reestablishment of a family-name-first ordering of Japanese names written in English, in a triumph for traditions abandoned due to the “Europeanization” policies in the Meiji Era (1868-1912). South Korea and other Asian peers are also showing their cultures by adapting or utilizing indigenous elements to suit foreign contexts.

Shen, who has been involved in foreign affairs activities organized by several municipal governments on the Chinese mainland, points to the good hard road China has been taking to have a seat at the table, making translators and interpreters more relevant than ever.

According to Pan, such relevance is reminiscent of an academic debate over the translator’s invisibility. She believes that no matter what the theory holds, translators in practice, with specific goals and their own interpretations, cannot make themselves completely invisible. But such invisibility adds a meaningful footnote to a subtle, yet far-reaching influence that translators carry in a world in flux, she reckons.

Pursuit of greater influence

The subtleness and delicacy have shed light on the promotion tactics in an ever-changing, fast-fragmenting geopolitical landscape, where there shouldn’t be any illusion of smooth sailing in China’s pursuit of greater cultural influence.

The row over the terms, Chinese New Year and Lunar New Year, is a telling example of how an age of intense soft power competition is in full play. In recent years, Lunar New Year is said to be more inclusive to other parts of Asia celebrating it, while many Chinese have dismissed it as having erased the origins and character of the most important festival on the Chinese calendar.

“When I was a child, Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year and Spring Festival were used interchangeably and no one deemed it a controversial problem at all,” Ma recalls. “But suddenly, we are told it’s politically incorrect and exclusive to call our most solemn festival Chinese New Year despite its rich tapestry of Chinese traditions.”

Technically, Lunar New Year isn’t an accurate term as the date of the festival is based on a Chinese lunisolar calendar, calculated according to exact astronomical observations of the longitude of the sun and the phases of the moon.

Yet, Shen expects no theoretical significance or academic value emanating from the row. She took a hard look at it as a cultural issue flagged up by neighboring countries, which do not celebrate the festival with as long a history or on the same grand scale as Chinese do, to endorse their own customs and cultural elements.

Shen insists on calling it Chinese New Year and Spring Festival, or simply chun jie as a “once and for all” solution in practice, just as South Korea projects Chuseok as the Mid-Autumn Festival.

As neighboring countries studied and borrowed from Chinese civilization, whose lasting influence spreads throughout East Asia and most parts of Southeast Asia, modern China will find the regional cultural rivalry a recurring theme for the great-power competition that extends beyond military and economic affairs into the realm of stories, images and information.

Here comes an oft-ignored historical episode, where China has missed the boat in global cultural narratives since the latter part of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), and many cultural concepts originating from China, such as umami (savoriness) and bonsai (the art of training and growing dwarf trees in containers), have been labeled with the origins of early mover, Japan, Shen notes.

Such late-mover status underscores why translators should grasp the initiative to play catch-up in global communication, with no cultural issue to be treated lightly.

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Pan believes this marks a well-timed moment for Hong Kong. Highlighting yuen yeung — the Cantonese pronunciation for mandarin duck — she lauds the name of a harmonious mixture of coffee and milk tea popular at restaurants across Hong Kong as living embodiment of the city’s unique melding of Eastern and Western influences.

Such a classic case generates a wealth of cultural imagination and association through a blend of the best of both worlds, in a way that strikes no jarring chord, says Pan. It also vividly shows that Hong Kong has all the elements needed to be a bridge for cultural exchange and communication.

As Chinese social anthropologist Fei Xiaotong says, “Appreciate the beauty of each culture, recognize the beauty in others, share the beauty together, and achieve harmony in the world”.

“An impactful, meaningful translation like yuen yeung is what’s behind a cultural sensation like Black Myth: Wukong. It’s a mission of our times for the international reach of Chinese culture,” says Pan.  

Contact the writer at sophialuo@chinadailyhk.com