Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998
Trade with China
Thomas M. Miovas, Jr.
>From Betsy Speicher
>
>Anne Locke wrote:
>
>> I'm interested in exploring ways to fight the trade with China
>> engaged in by U.S. companies and sanctioned by our government.
>
>Here are some ideas off the top of my head:
[clip]
>Get _Anthem_ translated into Chinese and smuggled into Red China.
After dating a Korean woman for several months, meeting her
parents, and knowing an Objectivist contact in Seoul, I can tell
you that while the suggestion would be a start, it won't be that
easy to spread Objectivism to semi-free Asian countries, let
alone China. Individualism is so foreign a concept to them, that
one may as well try to get the Martians to understand
Objectivism. I'm not saying it's a lost cause, but much of the
difficulty will be due to what is embedded in the language and
culture. The best approach would be to find those who are
struggling in the right direction, and work on them -- rather
than throwing a bunch of printed pages at the people at large.
My Korean girlfriend, for instance, understands written English
well enough to follow about 80% of what I write to her as part
of our conversations, yet she hasn't been able to grasp
_Anthem_. I'm not exactly sure what the problem is -- aside from
her trying to read in a language foreign to her -- but I've
tried to explain it to her in terms of "I" and "we" (as first
person singular versus first person plural), and something is
getting lost in the translation. She's struggling in the right
direction, so I will continue to press on, since she is a high
value to me (for reasons I won't go into here).
In an attempt to communicate better with her while she is
improving her English, I bought a computer program called
"Universal Translator," which claims to be able to translate 25
different languages, including English and Korean. Once I got
the hang of it, I wrote her a few things in Korean. She said it
didn't make any sense, so I figured out how to counter-translate
the Korean back into English, with interesting results.
"Selfish" comes out as "asocial," "self-interest" has no
translation, and "rational" comes out as "logos situated."
One of the key passages of _Anthem_ comes out as "Charge, who
are one and only, aloha you, who are one and only."
"Nature, reason, happiness, freedom" comes out as "nature,
account, blessing, freedom."
The program translates individual words more correctly than
sentences. "Human life is the standard of value" (taken
individually) comes out as "Human anima does ruffle capon
[Korean symbol] aqueous humour [Ks] banner cedarn account." I
guess this means "Human life force does ruffle a castrated
rooster because one can't see the forest for the trees." Taken
as a sentence, it comes out as "Human vital three kernel [Ks]
singular ruffle capon [Ks] aqueous humour [Ks] banner cedarn
account," which I guess means "The three powers of human life
really ruffles a castrated rooster because one can't see the
forest for the trees."
The coup de grace is that "I" comes out as "alphabet 9nth
letter," even though local Koreans tell me there is a Korean
word for "I."
Granted, it's only a fifty dollar program, but it just goes to
show that it will take an expert in both Korean and Objectivism
to get a good translation, and ditto for Chinese!
