Re: The Art of Tea #1 - A first take

Danny:

I think you are missing a word here? A rather crucial one...

"I don't much of any of the reviews".... do you mean you don't think much of them? Care much? Care to elaborate? :)

MarshalN

It is left out for you to insert... :"P

I would suggest

Think

Care

Like

Enjoy

Believe

Trust

...

Reviews are often subjective, in this case it is strongly steered by personal tastes and perceptions. What is more daunting, is as what you have mentioned ( I think) are cakes that are not easily available these days. So what are consumers like us to make of them? It's like reading an english review of a novel written in Japanese; not many of us are not able to visit the nearest vendor or ebay and get the cakes to sample them on our own.

The reviewers also often provide conflicting views on the cakes, so what are we to make of them, when we cannot see for ourselves if we agree or disagree with any of them?

The straw that broke the camel's back is the translator's commentary at the end of the review...technical errors, not fully understanding the language one is translating and writing on a subject one is unclear on, are some of the gravest mistakes a translator can make.

Technical error: is he translating from mandarin or cantonese?

Danny

Wow, that bad?

I haven't had a chance to see the English mag yet, so I can't comment, but if the translator wrote a commentary that didn't make sense or raised alarm bells to you, then....

The Chinese reviews are strongly steered by personal taste, I agree -- you can tell who's going to like the wet stored cake, and who will hate it, for example. Even the cakes that "win" the blind taste tests often gets slammed by at least one person, if not more. That, and I hate to say, there are always financial interests involved as well... suspicion that can't be wiped out as some of the tasters (not all) are tea merchants who might sell the same cake, or similar cakes, in question.

MarshalN

Danny, just to clarify, you are not speaking generally, right? That is, you're actually saying that the translator who worked on the magazine did a bad job?

The appearance of independence is a key factor -- if the THE factor -- for any product opinions to be taken seriously. I think the market is sophisticated enough to understand this.

MarshalN wrote:

Hi Alex,

To be fair, I should have specified that it is specifically on that review.. The thing is that the same article appeared in chinese in the chinese edition, so I had a chance to compare both the original and the translated copy...for example, what is one to make of the term "comfortable aroma"? The inconsistency of pinyin used throughout the magazine only show us how poorly the translating team has performed on the magazine. A magazine such as this, which is a groundbreaking first in the world of tea for the english speaking market, should be well thought and thorough in its execution, as most english speaking tea lovers could rely on only on pinyin to identify teas, any muddleness in this would only serve to confuse them.

The downside is that this magazine is written by Taiwanese and its team of english editors who seriously need to attend a pinyin class - be it in the standard pinyin or the Taiwanese pinyin, and standardize the magazine for us readers.

Danny

Thanks for the review, Danny. That was very helpful.

One of the things that they taught us in college, that is virtually never heeded by Chinese people, is that translators should really only ever translate into their native languages. Something that has been translated into a imperfectly-learned second language is just too hard to process. Obviously there are many non-native speakers of English that are exceptions to this rule, but they are far fewer than the number of people who *think* they are exceptions, but aren't. I was on a journal in law school that got a lot of submissions from second-language English speakers, and I did a fair amount of editing when I lived in China, and I can tell you that there is nothing on this earth that I find less enjoyable than reading a full-length article that has been badly translated by someone who has a less-than-fluent command of English.

Also, as many of you know, bad pinyin makes me froth at the mouth.

I think I'm going to give this magazine a temporary pass, and see what they come up with for Issue Two.

Alex trying to spot the camphor in the aged pu'er

Is there really no room for substance over form???

Alex wrote:

I haven't had a chance to read the mag yet, but from the few pages that Guang posted on his blog, I have to say I agree with your assessment -- there are lots of places where the English seems awkward, and it is sometimes obvious that the translators simply weren't up to the task of writing in English that native speakers find easy to read (without thinking... "um.. ok... I think they meant THIS"). The substance and the ideas are still there, but it could've been much better.

As I've said before... Wu Shing's copy-editing skills is also a bit on the low side. In those same few pages there were some typos... I can only imagine there were more in the rest of the magazine. Why it is so hard to eliminate typos, I do not understand. A magazine that is the inaugural issue should be perfect, not full of these silly technical errors. While they are obvious and thus not a big deal, it does imply a sort of sloppy attitude to their work.

MarshalN

Hi Alex,

The mag despite its flaws, has its credits and I think we should give credit where it is due.

For one, this is a groundbreaking mag on chinese tea in english and we should applaud its efforts. While its typo errors are something I can overlook, what I'm seriously displeased with it is that they have churned out a mag that's rather thoughtlessly produced - irresponsible translation with poor grasp of the subject matter, abridgement (why? I have no idea), poor sentence constructions, etc; all seem to tell the reader that they are more eager in producing a glossy mag in english to fill the gap instead of seriously wanting to produce a mag that would benefit the reader.

For example is this review on cake F:

Jou Yu: This tea had no real distinct flavor. It was very watery without any hui gan. The only strength of this tea would be its sensation (yun), which spread out across the surface of the tongue. Otherwise it was an altogether unremarkable tea.

Here it is in chinese, for those who understands chinese, I'll let you decide for yourself how poor the translation is:

周渝: 这茶刚泡下去甘味不显, 好似这茶一点都不起眼, 而且又有水味. 唯一的优点是有韵,韵比较长, 在舌面有扩散的感觉.

1. The hui gan is not apparent, not "without any hui gan".
2. No where in the original does it mention that this tea has no real distinct flavor
3. No where in the original does it mention that "it was an altogether unremarkable tea"

I'm sure the original articles in english written would be more interesting to read than these translated articles posing to be informative, but in truth, misleading.

Danny

Hi Alex,

The mag despite its flaws, has its credits and I think we should give credit where it is due.

For one, this is a groundbreaking mag on chinese tea in english and we should applaud its efforts. While its typo errors are something I can overlook, what I'm seriously displeased with it is that they have churned out a mag that's rather thoughtlessly produced - irresponsible translation with poor grasp of the subject matter, abridgement (why? I have no idea), poor sentence constructions, etc; all seem to tell the reader that they are more eager in producing a glossy mag in english to fill the gap instead of seriously wanting to produce a mag that would benefit the reader.

For example is this review on cake F:

Jou Yu: This tea had no real distinct flavor. It was very watery without any hui gan. The only strength of this tea would be its sensation (yun), which spread out across the surface of the tongue. Otherwise it was an altogether unremarkable tea.

Here it is in chinese, for those who understands chinese, I'll let you decide for yourself how poor the translation is:

周渝: 这茶刚泡下去甘味不显, 好似这茶一点都不起眼, 而且又有水味. 唯一的优点是有韵,韵比较长, 在舌面有扩散的感觉.

1. The hui gan is not apparent, not "without any hui gan".
2. No where in the original does it mention that this tea has no real distinct flavor
3. No where in the original does it mention that "it was an altogether unremarkable tea"

I'm sure the original articles in english written would be more interesting to read than these translated articles posing to be informative, but in truth, misleading.

Danny

Hey Danny,

I'm not sure what you mean. Does the English version contain PinYin and the corresponding Chinese characters for tea names,terms,concepts,etc for us who find that interesting? I understand translating grammar to English but name,places,things,etc in PinYin and the character. For example Chi Tse Beeng Cha should be left alone.

xiexie, Jim

samarkand wrote:

I hope Mr. Fisher is reading this forum because everybody is giving constructive comments about their 1st magazine. We have to give them credit for taking the first step and I hope Mr. Fisher and Wu-shing can understand that all we want to do here is to show them where they err and what need to improve.

For one thing, a few of us who are harsher towards the magazine are mainly those who can understand chinese and english. We saw the chinese version and we tried to compare it with the english version. It wasn't pretty. We are worry that certain articles in the magazine might be misleading and for those of you who are new in tea drinking and those who don't understand chinese, you might be misinformed.

I myself involve in the publishing line for many years already and I personally got quite agitated when I saw typos popping up everywhere in a publication. No matter how glossy a book look, a badly proofread article IS a bad article. It makes me wonder about the quality. I was pretty much done with the magazine after I saw these two typos: The Executive Editor's name is written as "Liang Chun Chin" on page 1 (page 1!). The chinese name below it says: 梁俊智。 I just need to flip to the next page and lo and behold, his name is written as "Liang Chun Chih"!

They can't even standardize their own name. On the cover, it is written Wu-shing Books. On the Table of Contents page, it is written Wushing Books.

??????????

Whose fault is this? Editor's? Proofreader's? or DTP artist's? For me, mistakes as simple as these should have caught the attention of even the first person who is in contact with the article, namely the DTP artist. Surely their own employee knows the name of their own company and of their own boss!

Mr. Fisher, when we publish a book. The book is passed back and forth between the editors/writers and proofreaders at least 3 times before it is being finalized. This is an industry standard. Surely Wu-shing (or is it Wushing?) must have known about this.

I would suggest most of you to give their second issue another chance. After all, now that we have told them what they need to do with their next issue, I hope they have learnt something from all of us.

I will wait for the second issue before I pass my final judgement.

Absolutely none.

Hi Danny. I will give limited credit, in that the world needs an English-language tea magazine, and that translating the less blatantly commercial or irrelevant articles in Pu-Erh Teapot is a great place to start.

That translation, however, is as bad as you claimed, and last I checked the correct transcription of 周渝 is Zhou Yu. Ugh. It makes my skin crawl.

Alex

No Jim, what Danny was saying is that the translation is off, inaccurate, misleading. Instead of translating the article, it would be more interesting to just write with English in the first place.

Hee

Space Cowboy wrote:

Just for fun, let me try translating this to show what should probably be a better translation, for the benefit of those who don't read Chinese. Those of you who do read it, please confirm/edit my translation as you see fit.

Zhou Yu (or Chou Yu in Wade-Giles, the standard romanization scheme used in Taiwan. Jou Yu is pronounced "Rou Yu" under Wade-Giles...): This tea, when first brewed, does not have an obvious "gan" taste, as if the tea doesn't attract any attention at all. There's also a watery flavour. The only upside to the tea is that there is "yun", and the "yun" is relatively long [as in long lasting]. This feeling spreads itself on the tongue

So as you can see.... it's quite different from what actually made it into the mag.

MarshalN

I echo your sentiments entirely.

Unfortunately, the typo mistakes also pervade, to a slightly lesser extent, in their Chinese version. For a quarterly magazine, the level of copy-editing is horrendous. It's not as if they're under a deadline to print their paper before 2am (and you almost never see typos in newspapers). I have heard that publishers in China or Taiwan usually require a typo rate of less than one world in 100,000 words, and Wu Shing, unfortunately, fails miserably in that regard.

MarshalN

I should've read my translation one more time before sending....

Now that I read it again... "yun" should best be translated as "aftertaste", instead of "sensation" or just left as "yun". That would make it most clear to novices, as "yun" is closest to what an aftertaste should be.

MarshalN