行天下

It has been long. Still, I hope I can have stable access to here and express myself freely.

In August, the weekly magazine YWeekend was among the few media outlets that didn't pan the second Garfield movie. The paper's always been giddy about online culture, and it was quite excited to discover that the dubbing in Garfield 2 had made liberal use of contemporary online slang.
Last week, the paper returned to the subject of the Internet's role in movie translation. The first half of the article revisits last August's report on net-slang in the movies with updates for some recent films like Night at the Museum. Here's a list of techniques to give your translations that cutting-edge feel:

Five strategies for mastering popular translation

Be familiar with the Internet; spend time in forums; understand the newest terminology.
Never, never trust the dictionary you have - even if it is updated every year, it can't keep up. Learn how to use search engines; when you run across words you don't know, then enter "new words, slang, or net-speak" in the search bar and you'll definitely find the newest version.
When you have time, go out and chat with people. Try to speak normal language every day.
Try to read newspapers and magazines and note how the headlines change.
Watch more movies and skits - they contain countless examples of popular terms.
The second half of the feature looks into the growing phenomenon of online translation teams producing subtitles for just-released foreign films and TV shows in record time. Some excerpts:

The fast-draw translation of language genuises
by Chen Qimei
Eight years of study; eight hours to translate a US series

Xiao San, translator for Into the West, was for 8 years a fanatic student of the history of the American west, and from middle school he has devoured English-language history books. In 2004, when an American friend of his told him that Into the West was about to air, he decided that he had to translate it. At the time, no Chinese subtitle group was aware of the miniseries.

One night in 2004, right after American TV had broadcast the latest two episodes of Into the West, he got his hands on them and spent 8 hours translating, neither eating nor sleeping. Usually, he takes only half the time to translate two episodes of 24. His familiarity with history meant that he was more of a stickler for detail.

Because he is intimately acquainted with that period of history, when he watched one episode he basically knew what the next episode would show. So when translating, he'd frequently "have an epiphany, and suddenly understand what a sentence meant." Xiao San's translations are basically error-free and his language is well-crafted, establishing his position in the translation group.

Xiao San has run with the translation group for three years; he still feels that the translations from "Shanghai Dubbing" are at the peak, but he is confident in himself: "Compared to us folk-translators, Shanghai's translations are concise and invisible - sometimes they're paraphrases, whereas we'll translate American jokes into jokes that Chinese people will understand." To his mind, perfection is this: a person in a movie does not believe the words of someone else, so he makes reference to a famous lie; this was translated into "That's more of a fake than the Xi'an BMW lottery ticket!"

Translation is a sacred feeling

Xiao re was one of the interpreters of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. He's a die-hard fan of that movie. His translation skills have been jokingly described as "freakish" by members of his group.

He doesn't remember phrases that he's satisfied with, but two mistakes he always carries with him: "Once, I translated 'Captain Apollo' as '[Ship] Captain Apollo', but it really should be translated as [Rank] Captain Apollo'; another time, because I wasn't familiar with The Bible, I translated Cain as 凯恩, but it really should be 该隐."*

Most netizens won't look to carefully at the swiftly-passing subtitles, but some people will make big posts correcting mistakes on the translation group forums....

To guarantee quality, re will leave blank the words that he has not come up with, and then he plays the video together with the subtitles, watching it like an audience member to find out the meaning of the blank spots. Finally, he will turn off the sound and watch it again, only looking at the subtitles, as a final copy-edit. This work will take around five hours.

Xiao re cleverly avoids risk: he only takes shows to translate that he likes and has an interest in. "The lead translator of an episode must first like that show before he can completely rise to his potential." However, translating with the "heart" is not necessarily the best option; Xiao re must suppress both his affection for certain characters to avoid making them shine too much and his hatred for other characters so that he is lenient with them. A translator once did the following: when a character made a brazen remark, the translator couldn't help adding "What kind of person is this?" in parenthesis as an aside. Their personal predilections can become hidden footnotes to popular culture.

When he translated Battlestar Galactica, he felt immersed in a holy state of mind: "My own feelings were in utter harmony with the people speaking. I really hoped that I what I translated would do justice to their magnificent words. So in my mind I had the notion that I really, really had to do a good job translating....if you fall in love with a show, that's what you'll do."

Five mistakes and you're out!

How do translators work? How do they divide up the workload? And how do they ensure quality? We interviewed LL, who is in charge of a subtitling group. His work situation brings us closer to the translators hard at work in the tide of "spiritual civilization."

After dinner, LL logs in as usual to the subtitling forum and inquired about the state of progress on 24. Then he exchanges a few words about the newest movies out with other subtitling bosses in his QQ group. Finally he takes out the newest episode of Prison Break as translated by group members. Looking through it, he discovers a number of mistakes..."shoddy, embarrassing! I want it fixed immediately!"

The reporter asked him, "Will they fix it?" He said, "If they don't obey, they're out!" As boss of the subtitle group, LL is ruthless in protection of its reputation: "One episode is divided among four or five members, so each person has just a bit more than ten minutes to do. If they have more than 5 mistakes, then their translation powers are stripped. We want to be like those professional teams who translate with no typos and no grammatical errors."

Making the subtitles as good as the program

Discriminating viewers will choose a subtitle group that they like, just like choosing a desirable restaurant at which to eat Kung Pao Chicken. Competition among subtitle groups is intense, and there is endless conflict between quality and speed.

For a series that airs at 10am in the US, the subtitle group will translate subtitles by 2pm. "Any faster isn't possible," said LL, "unless the American script-writer sent us the script directly." In the first draft of subtitles is sent out to make time, so mistakes are unavoidable. They'll issue a "polished translation" at 10pm to make clarifications and corrections. This is the way many subtitle groups work: endlessly improving the subtitles and issuing newer drafts.

Talent pools awaiting orders

Before 300 had been out long in the US, LL's group assigned crack translators to interpret: two foreign students in Australia, two in New Zealand, and four overseas Chinese online correspondents in the US and Canada accepted the mission. The subtitles came out two weeks later.

"There are many people translating popular pictures together," but the translation itself is strictly voluntary. The realities of work, school, and travel are reasons that people withdraw from translation groups. The nucleus of the group is fixed, but on many occasions they have to recruit temporary translators; any time they cannot find enough suitable translators, their translation speed will be exceeded by another subtitle group. To avoid that eventuality, LL set up a special "talent pool." A recruitment notice posted on the forum is always in effect, and anyone who wants to translate may leave their contact info. When a new show needs translators, LL will fire off a message to those candidates.


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Note: Typical Chinese usage follows the Protestant transliteration; Catholic translations use 加音 for Cain.

Every
afternoon, just after lunch, my almost two-year-old daughter takes a nap. Sometimes the task of settling her falls to me, and often as I put her down amid the teddies, snuggled in a pink gingham sleep suit, I feel a sharp twinge of envy.

Who doesn't crave a midday snooze now and then? There are some people, myself among them, for whom lying down somewhere quiet is a necessity.

So I was fascinated to read a few weeks ago that the French health minister, Xavier Bertrand, has called for the country's employers to take seriously the idea of letting their workers take siestas. “Sleep must not be trivialised,” he said. “Why not a siesta at work? It can't be a taboo subject.”

He'll get no argument from me, if only because the scientific evidence is on his side. Many of his countrymen and women will probably agree, too. Reportedly, more than half of French people who suffer poor sleep think it affects their performance at work.

Bertrand's idea is to conduct an experiment in which a limited number of volunteer companies introduce the after-lunch kip, and then study the results. The siesta would be limited to 15 minutes, and if it improves concentration and quality of work it might be adopted more widely.

As it happens, there is already a reasonable amount of evidence that midday sleeps can help with skills such as memory and learning. In 2000, for example, Masaya Takahashi and Heihachiro Arito from Japan's National Institute of Industrial Health studied the effects of a 15-minute nap after lunch on alertness and logical reasoning in 12 students who'd only been allowed four hour's sleep the night before.

They found that the students who had a nap did better in a test of cognitive function than their napless counterparts. They also reported less sleepiness and were better at logical reasoning. The benefits were seen particularly in the mid-afternoon, the scientists said - at a time when many of us can be found rifling through desk drawers looking for matchsticks to prop open our eyelids.

Other scientists have looked at naps from the perspective of learning and memory. Sara Mednick and her colleagues at Harvard, for example, have done a lot of work with a test that measures how well people can detect specific images amid visual distractions.

In one experiment, they trained roughly 70 participants to do the visual test early one morning. In the early afternoon, some were told to have a 60-minute nap, others were given a 90-minute nap and a third group of unfortunates weren't allowed any nap at all.

Later that evening all the participants were tested on their ability to perform the test. The no-nap group did significantly worse than they had in the morning, the short-nap group did roughly as well as they had previously and the long-nap group did much better. These findings show that napping helped the learning process.

The results I've described so far are all good reasons for taking naps, certainly, but there are better ones: namely, that napping might also be good for your heart. The evidence for this ultimate slacker's excuse was published this month in the excellent journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

In that study, Androniki Naska from the University of Athens Medical School in Greece studied some 23,000 men and women between the ages of 20 and 86, aiming to discover whether napping had any impact on risk of death from heart disease.

None of the patients in the six-year study had any history of heart disease before the study began. The scientists asked them all if they took midday naps, and if so, how often and for how long. They also reported their level of physical activity and dietary habits over the previous year.

Overall, 792 participants died in the six years of the study, including 133 who died from heart disease. The researchers carefully took account of other cardiovascular risk factors and found that people who took naps of any frequency and duration had a 34 per cent lower risk of dying from heart disease than those who did not. What's more, nappers who took a siesta for 30 minutes or more at least three times a week had a 37 per cent lower risk of heart-related death.

Among working men, the impact was even more substantial. On average, those who took midday naps had a 64 per cent lower risk of death from heart disease during the study than those who did not nap, the researchers found.

Given that I'm a working man (of sorts anyway), this is compelling stuff. All I need to decide now is how long I should be napping for. My daughter manages about three hours a day. Would that be too long, do you think?

什么，不该看到的看到了，该看到的看不到，杭州 确实比上海温柔很多 我怎么会知道会是这样的 ？我怎么知道

逛西湖总是让人很困的，好象有从天上灌下来的风，呼啸着穿过西湖底，再带上女人的脂粉，男人的汗水，那种气味 ，就是很特殊的。

杨柳其实早就长出来了，现在不是春天，春天已经没有了，冬和夏挤来挤去，渐渐的春就消失了。味千的那个靠窗的位置，很可笑的 。包括那些石碑，都在提醒我，自以为是。或许会占据我一段时间。自以为是。我收集的那些菜谱，在以后，很久的以后，管谁知不知情呢。

粉红色，或者淡黄色，又开始幻想那个房间。昨天我想，半年后，会在那个房间里怀着同样的心情。别看那些瓶子，其实只是装饰。一切都在假装宁静，安好，他们都柔化了一些坚硬的东西。为了休息的美好时光，日历上满是叉。我还是这么想，一定要找个朋友和我一起坐在窗台上喝酒，聊天，或者不用聊天。吃我做的甜点。如果天色暗了，就去看电影吧，或者我要搞台缝纫机，做点能假装宁静安好的东西。

那和小时候不一样，那是真正的宁静安好。如果我留在杭州，像所有人都会这么问我，找工作了吗，留杭州吗。我真的觉得，这里不安全的。西湖也不安全，大关也不安全。其实呢，也没什么，总有那么多人愿意去经历，勇敢的 去北京，或者 别的地方，寻找一些梦想的碎片 ，它们说不上梦想，只是看起来像而已。多一点经历，总让自己看起来成熟一点，看起来离成功近一点。

在这个时候 一份工作比什么都看上去体面。可是一份体面的工作并不一定让人活的体面。我终于明白，这个世界谁都不容易。你不是承受这样的压力，就是那样的。就算不小心幸福了一下，还要小心地承受着这之后的变数，不轻松的。一堆堆的乱石子，前面永远是乱石子。每天都不一样。在生命的终点，还是一堆乱石子。为什么还是这么勇敢的，推着乱石子 。

我在车上睡着又醒来的时候，旁边的女孩塞着耳机，眼睛直直的斜着窗外。另外座上的两个老太婆，穿着鲜红色的一样的运动服，激烈的聊天。活像两个红萝卜。这年头，年轻人永远显得苦大仇深。老年人永远显得幸福无邪。