This site uses cookies.
Some of these cookies are essential to the operation of the site,
while others help to improve your experience by providing insights into how the site is being used.
For more information, please see the ProZ.com privacy policy.
This person has a SecurePRO™ card. Because this person is not a ProZ.com Plus subscriber, to view his or her SecurePRO™ card you must be a ProZ.com Business member or Plus subscriber.
Affiliations
This person is not affiliated with any business or Blue Board record at ProZ.com.
English to Chinese: When globalisation goes into reverse
Source text - English There are rock festivals and book festivals – and then there is the annual globalisation festival, otherwise known as the World Economic Forum in Davos.
For the past decade, the Davos meeting has brought together big business, high finance and top politics to promote and celebrate the integration of the global economy. Whatever their business rivalries or political differences, the Davos delegates all agreed that the road to peace and prosperity lay through more international trade and investment – globalisation, in short.
But this year the forum has had to confront a new phenomenon – deglobalisation. The world that Davos Man created is slipping into reverse. International trade and investment is falling and protectionist barriers are on the rise. Economies are shrinking and unemployment is growing.
The symptoms of deglobalisation are all around us. Last week, it was reported that global air cargo traffic in December 2008 was down 22.6 per cent compared with December 2007. Abhisit Vejjajiva, prime minister of Thailand, told the forum that tourist receipts in his country had fallen by about 20 per cent year-on-year, in line with the general decline in international travel (and stripping out the effects of the temporary closure of Bangkok airport). In the US and Europe, governments are scrambling to bail out not just banks but also car companies. But, as the European Union has long acknowledged, “state aid” to national industrial champions is a form of protectionism.
Then there is “financial mercantilism”, the talk of this year’s Davos. This is the growing pressure on banks and financial institutions to retreat from international business and concentrate on domestic markets. Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s finance minister, captured the fears of many when he warned that his country and other emerging markets were in danger of being crowded out of international capital markets and of “decoupling, derailment and abandonment”.
Financial protectionism is driven by the logic of the market and political pressure. Banks that have lost confidence and capital in the credit crunch are retreating to the home markets they know best. And because so many banks have been bailed out by national taxpayers, they are also coming under political pressure to lend at home rather than abroad.
At Davos, however, there was little sign that the global financial crisis has led to any rethinking of the assumptions underlying globalisation. True, it has become fashionable to bash bankers and to call for greater international supervision of the financial system. But the virtues of free-market principles and international economic integration remain largely unchallenged.
In some ways, this year’s Davos emphasised how universal these ideas now are. Twenty years after the end of the cold war, it is still faintly astonishing to find the Russian prime minister warning against a “blind belief” in the “over-arching power of the state” and the Chinese premier letting it be known he is rereading Adam Smith in a search for inspiration.
But while the ideas that underpinned globalisation remain firmly in place, events are moving in the opposite direction. Newspapers strewn around the Davos coffee rooms told not just of a fall in global trade but of strikes in France, “buy America” legislation in the US, social unrest in Russia and anti-foreigner protests in Britain. The pledges made at Davos to “complete the Doha round” of world trade talks have now been made and broken so often, that they have the same make-believe quality as a yearly resolution to join a gym and lose a stone in weight.
In fact, even as political leaders renewed their globalisation vows in Davos, their governments were often taking contradictory steps back home. Few exemplify this contradiction better than Gordon Brown, Britain’s prime minister, whose grasp of international economics and passionate calls for international co-operation made him one of this year’s Davos stars.
At the forum, Mr Brown warned gravely against “deglobalisation” and denounced trade and financial protectionism. But delegates in Davos wondered aloud how this was compatible with his government’s pressure on Britain’s bailed-out banks to give priority to domestic customers. Meanwhile back home, disgruntled workers were on the march, carrying posters emblazoned with Mr Brown’s own words: “British jobs for British workers.” It is not that Mr Brown is a hypocrite. If only it were that simple. It is rather that he and other leaders are being pulled in two directions. Intellectually, they are convinced of the need to keep markets open and trade and investment flowing. Politically, they are under pressure to respond to voters who are angry, frightened and demanding protection.
Recent developments suggest that angry citizens will take priority over abstract ideas. Davos Man is losing control of events. The financial crisis demonstrated that globalisation had created an economic system more complex and more dangerous than the delegates gathered in Davos had ever realised. The inability of international politicians and businessmen to stop the drift towards protectionism looks like the next stage in the demolition of the Davos consensus.
For the moment, ideas have not caught up with the shift in the real world. At this year’s globalisation festival, delegates sang the old songs about open markets and international integration. But they were no longer belted out with much conviction. Out in the wider world, more and more people are no longer listening.
Translation - Chinese 世界上除了有摇滚音乐节和图书节，还有一年一度的全球化节，这个节日的另一个名字是达沃斯世界经济论坛。
Source text - English On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he makes Thomas Pynchon seem like a gadabout.
Mr. Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. “Nine Stories,” published two years later, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.
In the 1960s, though, when he was at the peak of his fame, Mr. Salinger went silent. “Franny and Zooey,” a collection of two long stories about the fictional Glass family, came out in 1961; two more long stories about the Glasses, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction,” appeared together in book form in 1963. The last work of Mr. Salinger’s to appear in print was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a short story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. In the ’70s he stopped giving interviews, and in the late ’80s he went all the way to the Supreme Court to block the British critic Ian Hamilton from quoting his letters in a biography.
So what has Mr. Salinger been doing for the last 40 years? The question obsesses Salingerologists, of whom there are still a great many, and there are all kinds of theories. He hasn’t written a word. Or he writes all the time and, like Gogol at the end of his life, burns the manuscripts. Or he has volumes and volumes just waiting to be published posthumously.
Joyce Maynard, who lived with Mr. Salinger in the early ’70s, wrote in a 1998 memoir that she had seen shelves of notebooks devoted to the Glass family and believed there were at least two new novels locked away in a safe.
“Hapworth,” which has never been published in book form, may be our only clue to what Mr. Salinger is thinking, and it’s unlike anything else he has written. The story used to be available only in samizdat — photocopies of photocopies passed along from hand to hand and becoming blurrier with each recopying — though it has become somewhat more accessible since the 2005 DVD edition of “The Complete New Yorker.” In 1997 Mr. Salinger agreed to let Orchises Press, a small publisher in Alexandria, Va., bring out a hardcover edition, but five years later he backed out of the deal.
Ever since, Salinger fans have been poring over the text, looking for hidden meaning. Did the author’s temporary willingness to reissue “Hapworth” indicate a throat-clearing, a warming up of the famously silent machinery? Or was it instead an act of closure, a final binding-up of the Glass family saga — one that, coming last but also at the chronological beginning, brings the whole enterprise full circle?
“Hapworth,” to summarize the unsummarizable, is a letter — or rather a transcription of a letter — 25,000 words, written in haste, by the 7-year old Seymour Glass, away at summer camp, to his parents, the long-suffering ex-vaudevillians Les and Bessie, and his siblings Walt, Waker and Boo Boo, back in New York.
Seymour, we learn, is already reading several languages and lusting after Mrs. Happy, the young wife of the camp owner. He condescends to his campmates and dispenses advice to the various members of the family: Les should be careful about his accent when singing, Boo Boo needs to practice her handwriting, Walt his manners, and so on.
The letter concludes with an extraordinary annotated list of books Seymour would like sent to him — a lifetime of reading for most people, but in his case merely the books he needs to get through the next six weeks: “Any unbigoted or bigoted books on God or merely religion, as written by persons whose last names begin with any letter after H; to stay on the safe side, please include H itself, though I think I have mostly exhausted it. ... The complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy. ... Charles Dickens, either in blessed entirety or in any touching shape or form. My God, I salute you, Charles Dickens!” And so on, all the way through Proust — in French, naturally — Goethe, and Porter Smith’s “Chinese Materia Medica.”
“Hapworth,” in short, must be the longest, most pretentious (and least plausible) letter from camp ever written. But though it’s the work of a prodigy, it’s also, like all camp letters, a homesick cry for attention.
Its author is the same Seymour who, while on his honeymoon in Florida years later (but — it gets confusing — 17 years earlier in real time, in the 1948 short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), will take an automatic pistol from the bottom of his suitcase and shoot himself through the temple as his bride lies napping in the twin bed next to him. And the same Seymour — the family saint, poet and mystic — whom we’ve heard about at such length in the later Glass stories.
Or is he the same? The Seymour of “Bananafish,” and “Raise High the Roof Beam,” is more a sweetly charming neurotic than the ethereal, otherworldly figure described in “Seymour: An Introduction,” who in turn seems not in the least like the superior, boastful little genius of “Hapworth.” The discrepancies among the various versions of Seymour is such that some critics have questioned the motives and reliability of Buddy, Seymour’s younger brother and the family scribe, who is our source for much of what we know (and also the transcriber of the “Hapworth” letter).
But that kind of tricky, Nabokovian reading feels forced in this case. Mr. Salinger seems less interested in keeping the details straight than in getting them right and offering some explanation, or justification perhaps, for that moment, still startling even after many rereadings, when Seymour blows his brains out. It’s as if Mr. Salinger realized, belatedly, that he had prematurely killed his best character and wanted to make it up to him.
And at some point, it seems fair to say, he fell in love with this project — not just with Seymour but with the whole clan. Who can blame him? The Glasses are one of the liveliest, funniest, most fully realized families in all of fiction. The trouble is that like a lot of families, they occasionally take themselves too seriously and presume to lecture the rest of the world. In the early ’60s, as a certain amount of sentimental and half-baked mysticism began to be spouted by some of the younger Glasses, the critics quickly turned on Mr. Salinger, and “Hapworth” was grumpily dismissed.
What makes “Hapworth” so fascinating, though, is that it’s the only work of Mr. Salinger’s in which the voice is not secure, as the young Seymour fidgets first with one tone and then with another — by turns earnest, anxious, playful and sarcastic. In effect he’s always revising himself. He worries about his spirituality and then skewers his fellow campers. He wants to be like Jesus, and he wants to sleep with Mrs. Happy. He yearns to be left alone, and is desperate to be noticed. He wants to be a saint, and even if he can’t quite admit it yet, he wants to be a great author. Intentionally or not, he seems like a projection of his creator.
In general what has dated most in Mr. Salinger’s writing is not the prose — much of the dialogue, in the stories especially and in the second half of “Franny and Zooey,” still seems brilliant and fresh — but the ideas. Mr. Salinger’s fixation on the difference between “phoniness,” as Holden Caulfield would put it, and authenticity now has a twilight, ’50s feeling about it. It’s no longer news, and probably never was.
This is the theme, though, that comes increasingly to dominate the Glass chronicles: the unsolvable problem of ego and self-consciousness, of how to lead a spiritual life in a vulgar, material society. The very thing that makes the Glasses, and Seymour especially, so appealing to Mr. Salinger — that they’re too sensitive and exceptional for this world — is also what came to make them irritating to so many readers.
Another way to pose the Glass problem is: How do you make art for an audience, or a critical establishment, too crass to understand it? This is the issue that caused Seymour to give up, presumably, and one is tempted to say it’s what soured Mr. Salinger on wanting to see anything else in print.
Sadly, though, Mr. Salinger’s spiritual side is his least convincing. His gift is less for profundity than for observation, for listening and for comedy. Except perhaps for Mark Twain, no other American writer has registered with such precision the humor — and the pathos — of false sophistication and the vital banality of big-city pretension.
For all his reclusiveness, moreover, Mr. Salinger has none of the sage’s self-effacement; his manner is a big and showy one, given to tours-de-force and to large emotional gestures. In spite of his best efforts to silence himself or become a seer, he remains an original and influential stylist — the kind of writer the mature Seymour (but not necessarily the precocious 7-year-old) would probably deplore.
Translation - Chinese 这个星期四，J.D.塞林格就要90岁了。生日派对大约是不会有的，或者即便有我们也永远别想知道。50多年来，塞林格先生一直隐居在新罕布什尔州的康尼什小镇。派遣记者前往康尼什一度曾是报纸和杂志热衷的“新闻体育运动”，他们希望能亲眼见到塞林格，或者至少能得到某个多嘴的当地人的描述以供引用。然而塞林格先生已经几十年不曾被摄影记者拍到了，邻居们也都噤若寒蝉。他的隐逸彻底得足以让托马斯·品钦显得像个游荡的闲人。
Source text - English Those late-night bar room arguments will never be resolved. Beatles or Dylan; Federer, Sampras or Laver; Picasso or Rembrandt; Pele or Maradona; and so on. Add “Burgundy or Bordeaux” to that list. Bordeaux admirers will speak of structure, class and breeding, of cellaring potential and cerebral celebrity; whereas pinotphiles who have devoted a good portion of their lives and incomes to the pursuit of that Holy Grail of wine, the great pinot noir, will dismiss that and rave about the sensual glories that superb Burgundy can offer, its ethereal fragrances, and the passion
that these wines stir. The latter believe that the only reason any wine lover could possibly favor Bordeaux over Burgundy is that they have yet to experience a top Burgundy; and that when they do, they too will see the light.
Great Burgundy is a rare beast. No region depends more on the vagaries of terroir, and many of the finest vineyards — Grand Crus — are tiny plots of land, often with numerous owners, each with a few rows of vines. Whether you subscribe to the Bordeaux bandwagon or have been blessed by Burgundy, there is little argument over the greatest Burgundies of them all (and even many of the most committed Bordeaux devotees will acknowledge these as the greatest wines of all). Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) makes truly extraordinary wines, often lifealtering. Domaine Leroy has strong supporters (Madame Bize-Leroy was expelled from DRC after a dispute between owners in the 1990s) and Henri Jayer who, sadly, passed away recently, was an acknowledged master, but DRC has built up a reputation over the decades. For many, these are the greatest wines the world has ever seen.
The Estate, currently part owned and managed by Aubert de Villaine, makes just seven wines, all Grand Cru. One white, a legendary Montrachet — there are those who will argue that not only does the Estate make the greatest reds on the planet, they also make the finest whites — and six reds: Echézeaux, Grands Echézeaux, Romanée- St-Vivant, Richebourg, La Tâche and Romanée-Conti. On very rare occasions, they release a premier wine called Cuvée Duvault-Blochet, which includes a hefty proportion of Richebourg. It only happens in great vintages like 1999 and 2002, and would usually be the wine declassified and sold in bulk as they’re not quite up to the requisite standard of the Estate, but is nevertheless of a quality that enables it to be released under the label of DRC.
It is worth noting that if you have a desire to try these wines, popping down to the local bottleshop to pick up a few for dinner is out of the question. The three ‘lesser’ wines are usually $500 to $1,000 a bottle; Richebourg and La Tâche sit around the $1,000 to $2,000 mark, while the famed, unicorn-rare Romanée-Conti is usually at least $4,000, and a bottle with great older vintages, many times that. For the Montrachet, expect to pay between $2,000 and $3,000. Despite these prices, demand is massive. The latest releases are from the 2004 vintage, considered good rather than great. De Villaine describes the vintage as having ‘linear clarity’ and ‘unexpected purity’. He compares the 2004 vintage to ‘chamber music’, while the 2005 vintage is like a ‘symphony orchestra’. There will be massive interest in the 2005’s wines, a brilliant vintage, just as there was with the 1999 and 2002 releases.
Both La Tâche and Romanée-Conti are monopoles (vineyards in Burgundy wholly owned by one estate), while all the rest are shared. The average age of the vines is 40 to 50 years. The winemaking for all the different vineyards is the same, so any differences in the wines can be attributed solely to the differing terroirs; but de Villaine is keen to dispel the notion that it is terroir alone that is responsible for the quality of his wines. This can be seen by the improvements in the wines from the Romanée-St-Vivant vineyard since it came under DRC’s control. Much work has been done in the vineyard to bring it up to the standard of the others. DRC abandoned pesticides in the 1980s and the Estate has been completely organic since 1985. It started experiments in biodynamics in 1996, and expects to head further down that road. De Villaine believes it is the discipline instilled by these practices that is important.
The wines are characterised by an ethereal, other worldly quality, with an astonishingly complex bouquet; elegance and finesse with underlying power and concentration. It is not often that one gets to taste these great wines, and rarer still that one has the chance to attend two different tastings within the space of a few days. That chance arrived when de Villaine visited the Mornington Peninsula for the biennial Pinot Noir Celebration, where he hosted a tasting of the 2004 wines for 160 people, the largest he had ever done. The wines are so limited that it is not possible to do this on a regular basis (even then, it was not possible to show either the Romanée-Conti or the Montrachet). A few days later, he hosted a comparative tasting of Richebourg and La Tâche for a much smaller group.
The 2004 tasting confirmed the class of the vintage. All the wines looked superb though there was much debate about the Grands Echézeaux. La Tâche edged out the Richebourg, as it did when they met again a few days later. Then, the comparative vintages were the 2004’s, 1996’s, 1991’s and the great 1990’s. In each case, although the Richebourg was magnificent (1991 was by far the least of the wines for both Crus), La Tâche showed that little bit more, confirming its reputation as one of the great wines on the planet. The 1990 DRC Richebourg was a dream wine to conjure dreams, yet even then, the 1990 La Tâche pulled the rug from under it. The flavours exploded on the palate as the aromas came in wave after wave. Gossamer elegance meets extraordinary complexity; still fresh, beguiling and amazingly long. Wine doesn’t get better than this.
Translation - Chinese 深夜酒吧中的那些激烈争论往往无休无止。甲壳虫还是迪伦，费德勒、桑普拉斯还是拉沃尔，毕加索还是伦勃朗，贝利还是马拉多纳，凡此种种。这个单子上还可以加上一条：“勃艮第还是波尔多。”波尔多的仰慕者往往会对酒的构成、品级与葡萄的繁育言之甚详，大谈窖藏年限与其中的心仪偶像；而那些将生命和收入的相当部分献给酒中圣杯——伟大的pinot noir黑皮诺葡萄酒——的酒友，则会对此嗤之以鼻，并对勃艮第佳酿所能带给人的感官荣耀极力溢美，赞叹这些美酒的轻盈芳香以及它们所引发的激情。在他们看来，之所以有些葡萄酒爱好者会认为波尔多胜过勃艮第，那是因为他们还不曾有机会尝过真正出色的勃艮第，而一旦他们有所体验，无疑也会赞同这一真理。
伟大的勃艮第葡萄酒如今已是珍稀动物。没有别的产区像勃艮第这样依赖土地的差异。很多最为优秀的葡萄园——被称为Grand Crus——都是小块的狭窄土地，而且常常由多个主人共有，每人名下几排葡萄树。但不论你是波尔多的热情支持者或是勃艮第的忠实拥趸，都应该不会对“最伟大的勃艮第葡萄酒”的桂冠归属产生疑议（甚至很多热诚之至的波尔多忠实者也都承认，这种美酒已经跻身“最伟大的葡萄酒”行列）。Domaine de la Romanée-Conti（DRC），真正非同凡响的葡萄酒，往往能带来影响人生的改变。Domaine Leroy拥有众多忠实支持者（Bize-Leroy夫人在90年代同酒庄主人的一次争执后被迫离开），最近刚刚谢世的Henri Jayer也是一位公认的大师，但是DRC的赫赫声名是在长久的岁月中累积而成的。对于很多人而言，这些品牌是当今世上仅见的不朽佳酿。
目前由Aubert de Villaine拥有并管理的Estate酒庄，只出产七种酒，全部为Grand Cru级。白葡萄酒一种，即传说中的Montrachet，有人认为Estate酒庄不仅生产这个星球上最了不起的红葡萄酒，也生产最顶尖的白葡萄酒；红葡萄酒六种：Echézeaux，Grands Echézeaux，Romanée- St-Vivant，Richebourg，La Tâche和Romanée-Conti。在极为少见的情况下，他们还会推出一种名叫Cuvée Duvault-Blochet的优质葡萄酒，其中Richebourg的成分很高。这种情况只发生于1999和2002这样的杰出年份，酒庄往往取消对它的分类并大批量销售，因为这种酒还未能完全符合Estate的要求，但是其优异的品质已够得上在DRC标签下推出了。
La Tâche和Romanée-Conti都是独有园（即所有权为独家所有的勃艮第葡萄园），其他葡萄园均为共有。葡萄树的平均树龄在40到50岁之间。这里所有葡萄园的制酒工艺都是相同的，因而酒的品味差异可以完全归究于土壤的不同；不过De Villaine极力反对这种他的酒品质“完全由土壤造就”的说法。我们也确实可以看到，自从DRC入主Romanée-St-Vivant葡萄园后，酒的品质得到了不小的提升。DRC为了把葡萄园的水准提升至同业标准之上做了大量的工作。早在80年代，DRC就停止使用杀虫剂，而自1985年起Estate就已经实现了葡萄种植的完全有机化。从1996年起，它开始进行生物机能实验，并有望在这个方向上保持领先。De Villaine相信，这些做法所培植的理念对于行业而言至关重要。
此外，作为国风游戏的扛鼎之作，天刀还希望通过十城升月大事件，借助 IP 影响力反哺传统景点，助力传统文旅发展，体现社会责任感，巩固正面口碑，助力品牌持续发展。
Translation - English After the head-to-head competition for Chinese players between numerous major mobile game titles and the plateau period that followed, it has become exceedingly difficult for any new mobile MMOPRG title to achieve a breakthrough. For the debut of mobile game Moonlight Blade, this too, remained as a critical challenge to be addressed.
As we found out, compared to its competitors, M.B. has two advantages regarding IP operation (IP operation is a unique concept in China’s TV, film and game industries, referring to the efforts to build up the intellectual property value and fan base of a work and exploitation of its market potential across various forms):
No.1, previously a MMORPG hit for PC, M.B. already has years of experience in developing new forms of interaction between culture & digital creativity with positive word-of-mouth and good user acceptance.
No.2, M.B.'s distinctive usage of traditional elements has attracted a large number of fans of traditional Chinese culture, paving the way for further expansion of player base.
Based on these insights the release of M.B. mobile tapped into both these advantages. Utilizing the "moonlight" - an iconic element in the game as well as a national token of sweet sentiment in Chinese culture - as a key symbol, the campaign created a phenomenal event: "Moonlight over Ten Cities - Cultural & Tourism Innovation Program". The goal: to achieve market breakthrough and attract new players.
Furthermore, as the benchmark setter of the industry's ancient China themed titles, M.B. also expect the "Moonlight over Ten Cities" event to inject new vitality to China's traditional tourist attractions through the work's popularity among the younger generation, contributing to the development of traditional tourism industry as a way to fulfil its social responsibility while boosting the title's positive word-of-mouth and sustained development.
More
Less
Translation education
Bachelor's degree - Xiamen University
Experience
Years of experience: 22. Registered at ProZ.com: Mar 2009.
I've been working as a bilingual wine magazine editor in Guangzhou for the last six years.
Among my clients are institutions known for their uncompromising attitude towards quality and details, such as Berry Bros. & Rudd (BBR), Fisher's Travel SOS guide, Pepsi Co. China, Vogue magazine, to name just a few.
Expertise