yellow journalism

[crispy47]

Here is a translation of a TVBS report. Although the crime itself is newsworthy and certainly bad, the writing is so unbelievably offensive that I ended up feeling sorry for the criminal and feeling like the reporter and maybe the victims were the ones who belong in jail. The Chinese-language media in action.

Enjoy:270lb fat chick! pretends to be

Comments

Hi Chris!

[andoane]

Hi Chris!

How's it going? I google-stalked you since I'm leaving LA in 2 months
to go to Philly for residency, and apparently you're not in LA either. Google is amazing.

How's Taipei? Are you fluent in some form of Chinese now? What the
heck are you doing over there?!

I should have contacted you when I was in Vietnam last month. It
would have been closer to visit. I am trying to visit everyone before
I head out of LA. While I was in LA, I thought I had forever but now
forever is ending so I need to get a move on getting back in touch
with all these people. I might even go visit Mrs. Dillard and Mr.
Ziegler sometime soon.

Your juno account doesn't work anymore, so let me know if your actual email. My email is andoane@ucla.edu and I'm only allowing this to be posted because the account is ending in June (fortunately you seem to update this live journal fairly frequently).

Btw, I like your pictures on Flickr.

Hope to hear from you!

Anne

[redefinegravity]

your English version is so much less offensive. I've forgotten how bad Chinese can be. Maybe it's getting rid of the dino reference in 身材壯碩的恐龍妹 that did it. I liked how they kept on mentioning her weight.

Question: why are you switching units (kg-->lb, NTD-->US)? What's the point, to make it easier on an American reader?

[crispy47]

Oh, I was sorely tempted to translate 恐龍妹 as "dinosaur woman," or even better, "horrible dragon bitch," but unfortunately neither of those is accurate. In Taiwan, 恐龍妹 is an actual expression for an ugly woman, so it didn't seem fair to take it literally. I settled on "the beast," as in, "Damn, your girlfriend is a beast." I hate to think that it wasn't offensive enough, though. Maybe I made up for it with the title of the entry?

And yeah, I switched the units to US-style just because most people who read my lj are from America. No one else is going to read it, so it doesn't really matter.

[redefinegravity]

haha SORELY.

HORRIBLE DRAGON BITCH! the next XXer who pisses me off will be the honored recipient of that moniker.

Yeah i can tell it's some kind of slang like that, just like in cantonese "pork chop" is a name for an ugly woman, not a piggish woman. However, in the direct translation of course you lose the delicious connotations..I'd probably try to capture it with "land whale" or something like that.

I just think Chinese in general is just more grotesque than English, but maybe I've just become really desensitized to gross English.

[crispy47]

Land whale! Or course! God, where were you when I needed you? (Although really, I was rather fond of "the beast.")

I tend to agree with you on the more-colorful-ness of Chinese, although I also agree that part of the disparity is due to desensitization to English (that, btw, was two badass nominalizations in one sentence). But I think that the morphology of Chinese just makes it more receptive to those sorts of words.

[bessieintw]

I like to read your translation of the report (and I also learnt some new words at the same time). From what I've understood, it reflected the report and the fact pretty well. But I don't know what made you think the (Chinese) writing "is so unbelievably offensive". Is it...because the reporter emphasized her weight?

[crispy47]

Basically. It's just the glee with which the writer describes "恐龍妹," as if the money she stole were incidental, and her real crime were being fat and ugly and daring to exploit a girl who was so much prettier and therefore better than her.