UBC #15: Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee
Jun. 13th, 2006 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyUBC #15
Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. [Dee Goong An or Ti-kung-an, depending on which transliteration system Van Gulik is using]. Transl., introd., notes Robert Van Gulik. 1949. New York: Dover Publications, 1976.
Apparently, what I have come away with from this book is irritation at Van Gulik for dumbing down the transliteration of Chinese names in the text. His note at the end uses the Giles system--I know absolutely nothing about Romanization of Chinese characters, but I gather from context that this was the standard system in 1949--but the text itself prefers the Chinese For Dummies method, with the result that all the names look vaguely like they belong in a children's Saturday morning cartoon.
I am theorizing that my reaction is based on the doubled vowels. Judge Dee, Ma Joong, Bee Hsun (and especially his mother, Mrs. Bee), Candidate Hoo--I think my subconscious spent the entire book looking around for Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, and Roo. But in the Translator's Note, these personages appear as, for example, Judge Ti and Pi Hsün. I actually find this much less distracting, even if more "difficult"--but probably Van Gulik's intended audience was not science fiction fans.
(I hope this also makes it clear that it isn't Chinese itself that is getting the reaction; it's the deliberate choice on the translator's part, without quite enough consideration of English's own patterns of usage, to use a naïve transcription system.)
The text itself is an interesting anthropological artifact, both of 18th century China and of mid-20th century Western attitudes toward same. And also entertaining.
Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. [Dee Goong An or Ti-kung-an, depending on which transliteration system Van Gulik is using]. Transl., introd., notes Robert Van Gulik. 1949. New York: Dover Publications, 1976.
Apparently, what I have come away with from this book is irritation at Van Gulik for dumbing down the transliteration of Chinese names in the text. His note at the end uses the Giles system--I know absolutely nothing about Romanization of Chinese characters, but I gather from context that this was the standard system in 1949--but the text itself prefers the Chinese For Dummies method, with the result that all the names look vaguely like they belong in a children's Saturday morning cartoon.
I am theorizing that my reaction is based on the doubled vowels. Judge Dee, Ma Joong, Bee Hsun (and especially his mother, Mrs. Bee), Candidate Hoo--I think my subconscious spent the entire book looking around for Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, and Roo. But in the Translator's Note, these personages appear as, for example, Judge Ti and Pi Hsün. I actually find this much less distracting, even if more "difficult"--but probably Van Gulik's intended audience was not science fiction fans.
(I hope this also makes it clear that it isn't Chinese itself that is getting the reaction; it's the deliberate choice on the translator's part, without quite enough consideration of English's own patterns of usage, to use a naïve transcription system.)
The text itself is an interesting anthropological artifact, both of 18th century China and of mid-20th century Western attitudes toward same. And also entertaining.
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Date: 2006-06-13 04:09 pm (UTC)Wade-Giles (1940s) doesn't seem to vary much from Pinyin (most popular current method) on the vowels, although it does a lot on consonants. I know I sometimes have difficulty reading Chinese names aloud, because the Pinyin orthography isn't always an instinctive match to English (e.g. he uses a schwa, not a long E like the pronoun), but going cartoony is not the answer!
There's no excuse for using different spellings between a text and a note on the same topic. The poor indexer had to have screamed bloody murder, indexing each person twice.
Ugh. It would be like indexing Tolkien, with all his variations and nicknames. (I think Tolkien indexed himself, and he did a terrible job of it.)