the orientalism of names and words
26 Aug 2010 09:28 amBooks recently read: English: A Novel by Wang Gang, and the Sano Ichiro mystery series by Laura Joh Rowland. There is nothing in common between these two books except for being set in Asia; the former has been translated from the Chinese and the latter is an American book for an American audience, not to mention the roughly three hundred years' difference, too -- from the early Tokugawa to the Cultural Revolution. It's reading them so close together that I noticed the names.
It was really Gang's novel that made me notice, since the translator chose the rather unusual tactic of translating first names. (Surnames are left as-is.) The protagonist is thus "Love Liu", and his classmate is "Sunrise Chen" and his teacher is "Second Prize Wang". At first it was a bit confusing -- in English, we don't translate names per se, but then again, we have names that aren't really word-uses in themselves. Most people don't even know what their names mean, and even if we do, we have words that are only for proper-names (Alexander, Emily, Ethan); if there's a meaning to the name, we use that meaning to describe a thing, not the proper-name (protector, rival, strong).
But Love Liu's name plays some significance, in that there's a long passage where his parents try to explain why they gave him the name "love". If his name had remained in Mandarin, a reader would have to associate non-english-word with "love", and the association would probably only last a page, at most. The name would become -- like our English names -- a name for which any meaning is secondary, even negligible. But with the name translated, you constantly read "Love" when someone addresses the protagonist, just as you can't get away from the fact that Second Prize Wang is, well, probably never going to be first place.
( Meanwhile, over in the Tokugawa period -- written, curiously enough, by an American of Chinese-Korean heritage -- we have Ichiro Sano, and the issue of italics and non-default language. )
It was really Gang's novel that made me notice, since the translator chose the rather unusual tactic of translating first names. (Surnames are left as-is.) The protagonist is thus "Love Liu", and his classmate is "Sunrise Chen" and his teacher is "Second Prize Wang". At first it was a bit confusing -- in English, we don't translate names per se, but then again, we have names that aren't really word-uses in themselves. Most people don't even know what their names mean, and even if we do, we have words that are only for proper-names (Alexander, Emily, Ethan); if there's a meaning to the name, we use that meaning to describe a thing, not the proper-name (protector, rival, strong).
But Love Liu's name plays some significance, in that there's a long passage where his parents try to explain why they gave him the name "love". If his name had remained in Mandarin, a reader would have to associate non-english-word with "love", and the association would probably only last a page, at most. The name would become -- like our English names -- a name for which any meaning is secondary, even negligible. But with the name translated, you constantly read "Love" when someone addresses the protagonist, just as you can't get away from the fact that Second Prize Wang is, well, probably never going to be first place.