Posted on 07/25/2004 2:32:41 AM PDT by Happygal
TRADING with foreigners has always been riddled with potential Lost in Translation moments. There are apocryphal stories told at business school about how, for example, the Pepsi slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" when translated for Taiwan, actually meant "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead".
"Finger Licking Good" apparently translated into Chinese as "Eat your fingers off". My own favourite has always been the slogan for Frank Perdue's Perdue Farms. The slogan "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken" was translated into Spanish to mean "It takes a hard man to get a chicken aroused".
But even grammatical and cultural differences don't explain what a new translation has done with Bill Clinton's My Life which shows what a great admirer Bill is of all things Chinese and particularly of the great Chairman Mao, with whose sayings Bill has, apparently, peppered his book. We all know a certain amount of dodgy translation is required when you're dealing with Bill. "I did not have sex with that woman" means "Well, maybe a bit of light oral relief but what's that between friends?" And "My wife is one of the most capable women I know," means "I'm scared as hell of her." But the pirate Mandarin version of Bill's memoirs, which has come on to the market in record speed, is even more full of crap than Bill is. It manages to promise "new extra material" despite being half the length of the original book and it shows a picture of a great man, with a huge interest in and love for China and all things Chinese.
You will be hard pushed to find Bill recounting in the English language version of the book how, as a young child, he said to an uncle of his, "Take me to China to play. China is a mysterious and unique place. I couldn't help but marvel at the great inventions of the Chinese."
But it's all there in the Mandarin. This is apparently because, as a child, Bill "admired the ambition of Gu Yanwu", who said we should walk 10,000 miles and read 10,000 books.
There is also a refreshing frankness about the Mandarin version. Bill says he really doesn't trust his own judgement with women, confiding that Monica Lewinsky was"very fat". He also tells his wife to "shut up" on one occasion, although on first meeting Hillary, Chinese Bill apparently thought, "she was as beautiful as a princess" and told her his name was "Big Watermelon".
Bill also shares with the Chinese the fact that the Monica Lewinsky affair did not affect his marriage at all. So thorough has Bill, or rather, his assiduous translators, been in making the book more Chinese-friendly, that the very first sentence reads: "The town of Hope, where I was born, has very good Feng Shui". The official translation of Mandarin Bill's book will be published later in the year so fans will have to make do with the counterfeit bad translation for the time being.
But don't take my word that it's bad, try it for yourself. After all, as Bill says in his book: "I very much appreciated the famous sentence of Mao Zedong, 'You want to know the taste of the pear, then you have to eat it yourself.'"
Or suck it and see, as they say in the US. So how would Cigar Licking Good translate into Mandarin?
LOL
Big Watermelon.
oh ok... more like "they call me vienna sausage"
A bit off topic -- My wife just got a new curling iron. It the directions it cautions the user "do not use while sleeping."
Chicom campaign contributions were interesting.
He also tells his wife to "shut up" on one occasion-(First and last.)
I Rike how ashtrlay rook in my head. said birr crinton.
Clinton's great wail of China IT'S a cultural thing - the Chinese get a bad rap. All we ever read about is how they suppress free speech and throw people in prison for doing calisthenics. But while the UN purses its lips there does seem to be a lower tolerance of celebrity bullshit in the Far East.
Take Bill Clinton's doorstep-sized autobiography.
Of course the translators get roasted for leaving out references to Tiananmen Square and other government misdeeds. But they make up for it in other ways. You see, while China is, by all accounts, a pretty grim place to live, they don't seem to have too many of those tedious libel laws that we have to worry about over here.
So instead of Clinton fulminating about "unfortunate mistakes" with You Know Who, he tells us that "she was just very fat. I can never trust my own judgement."
Now while, technically, this might be 'made up' we all know it's how Clinton would have said it if the lawyers and Hillary's PR people didn't have him on a choke chain.
In fact, most of the book could have done with a taste of the Oriental view of things.
For one thing, they could have cut a few centimetres off the book's width by sparing us the lyrical waxing on Northern Ireland and instead just telling us, "it was for the votes".
Or perhaps they could have edited out all those bits about the witch-hunts (or criminal investigations as some called them). It would have been so much better than the watered-down literary baby food we were fed in the West.
Maybe Clinton will thank the rogue publishers by not attempting to sue them. He is a humanitarian after all, and they are protecting the Chinese people's right not to have to read bullshit memoirs.
Which might not balance out all those poor murd-ered dissidents, but it's a start.
Har! Best, most honest review ever!
Don't forget the classic "All your base are belong to us."
In other words, the Chinese version is about as accurate as the English version.
This Chinese Bill guy is stealing one of my most effective pickup lines!
Of course, I also sometimes claim to be William Hung.
And I hope your wife remembers that. Also, DO NOT Use While in Shower or Bathtub.
They call me 'tater salad'.
Big Watermelon? More like Bent SlimJim....
Funny!!!
"I thought this a very humorous take!"
LOL, agreed.
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