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In the middle of reading Isabel Allende's Zorro and I can't help but question the choices made about Diego's native heritage.

While making up a new culture/group is better than using a real one and getting it wrong, they don't even get a name? Why is the Spanish history part adhered to more-or-less, but the history of the Native Americans in the area can be completely glossed over and portrayed as something mythical? Very noble savage trope. The work is sympathetic to this group and to the Roma (which you'd hope, considering the theme of justice), but that doesn't make up for the stereotype of the whole thing

Particularly thinking about this because my current nonfiction read is Native Nations (Kathleen DuVal), which centers indigenous perspectives on their history and how it doesn't start and end with interactions with colonizing European forces.

The juxtaposition is just bad. Either make everything up, or do the same amount of research for all the groups.

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Notes on a Translation

A year ago I audited a course on translation of Taiwan literature to English. For our final we had to choose a chapter from a book and translate it. I faced particular problems as a non-fluent speaker (nor reader...) of Chinese, though it should be said that I had different problems to my classmates, who do not natively speak English.

I had chosen the first chapter of 牛肚港的故事 (Niudu-gang de gushi) by 王拓 (Wang Tuoh), which while does not have a full English translation published can be found under the title "The Story of Cowbelly Harbor." The titular harbor has this name because of the mountain overlooking the town that looks like a cow's head, and so the lower laying land thus looks like the belly of the cow.

牛肚港的故事 is a murder mystery, in the most simplistic of genre descriptions, starting out with the town drunk saying he saw a ghost, the corpse of a teenage town beauty. It's intention though is more social commentary on the period of White Terror in Taiwan by the ruling KMT (國民黨). Wang wrote this book during his time as a political prisoner.

I had previously read Wang's most well known short-story 金水嬸 (Jinshui-shen, Auntie Jinshui) for a seminar on Taiwanese Literature, though my understanding of it at the time was quite poor. His style is more direct, making it a tad easier than some other writers for the non-native speaker.

Wang's stories generally take place in rural North-east Taiwan, around Keelung, an important harbor and currently best known as being the rainiest place in all Taiwan. I already mentioned the language used is more direct, but you might misunderstand to what degree that makes things easier to read. Though Mandarin is the National Language, Minnanhua has a longer history here. In Southern Taiwan you hear it frequently, particularly among older generations. Cowbelly Harbor is 40 years old (written in 1982) about a rural fishing village by someone who himself was from a similar small village. Do you see where I'm going with this?

I did not anticipate the amount of words and phrases I had to cross check on Pleco and two or three Taiwanese Hokkein reference websites. Such as: 黑白講 - to speak without care, speak falsely (the pleco entry only has an explanation in Chinese (“閩南方言。把黑的講成白的，白的講成黑的。指沒有事實根據，而隨意亂講”))

The other issue that came up was what to do with names. For most, but not all, there were 2 options (that I was considering): a Mandarin pinyin transliteration, or a Hokkein one. Does 杜南山 become Du Nanshan or Tu Lamsan, 阿基嬸 as Auntie A-Ji or A-Ki, or to include the 阿 (used for nicknames, affectionate referal) at all.

These are just reflections on my little experience with translation, as I try again to read novel-length stories in Chinese. Maybe one day I could revise and post my translation of chapter 1 and blog trying to go past that.

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