Introduction

One of the great pleasures—and occasionally frustrations—in translation is hunting for translations of new words and unfamiliar terminology. It can be like a journey—you begin in one place, follow some false trails, backtrack a bit, and then stumble into a goldmine. Along the way you learn all about things that you'd never even thought existed before, some very useful, and some positively abstract. This article presents some of my own small journeys, tracking down English translations for Chinese words and phrases in the environmental field.

Dealing with dictionaries

This discussion will begin by looking at words and phrases for which misleading English translations have been enshrined in the corpus of bilingual Chinese-English dictionaries. Top of my list in this category is nishiliu - a word that describes a certain sort of geological mass movement, a type of landslide. The primary English equivalent that is provided by almost every dictionary is "mud-rock flow", which also happens to be the literal character-for-character translation of the Chinese word. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, "mud-rock flow" has no currency in common English usage. Instead, the closest equivalent is "debris flow". Both the English and the Chinese terms refer to a rapidly flowing, and sometimes destructive, mixture of rocks and fine particles ("debris") carried by torrential waters, a phenomenon common in mountainous regions.

Dictionaries are compiled by people like you and me, with a finite knowledge of the world, and so are not infallible.

Of course, sometimes the dictionaries don't provide us with the word at all. An example of one word that I cannot find even in large Chinese-only dictionaries is jian, jiandi or huangtu jian. According to the Atlas of Landforms of China (1985), this is a type of shallow valley peculiar to loess regions. A jian may be several hundred metres to several kilometres wide and tens of kilometres long, and has a flat valley floor. It is formed where loess has filled a previous river valley, and is mainly formed in river headwaters in areas not yet reached by headward erosion caused by the modern river (Atlas of Landforms of China 1985). Fortunately, the same reference provides a handy English word for the landform, "loess vale", which seems a reasonable translation. Interestingly, the character for jian has the same pronunciation as another character which refers to ravines or gullies in general.

Intriguing landforms and local climates

As is apparent above in the discussion on huangtu jian, locally-important landforms can be given names that are very specific to that kind of landform and that region. Since China has such a wide range of landscapes, the language has developed a number of interesting locally-specific or landform-specific terms, some of which, because of their specificity, give rise to difficulties when translating them to another language. For example, southwest China, and Yunnan and Guizhou in particular, has many tectonically-formed basins known locally as bazi. These usually have a relatively flat floor, and are ringed by hills or mountains, often arranged along bounding faultlines. Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, lies in such a basin. The basin is bounded to the west by the dramatic fault scarp of Xishan (the Western Hills), which towers above the expanse of Dianchi, the largest lake in Yunnan. It should be noted that bazi refers specifically to the floor of the basin (i.e. the plain), and does not include the surrounding hills.

Sometimes we come across compound words that simply do not make sense translated directly into English. Thus, for example, many writings on Yunnan province refer to the liti qihou, or 'three-dimensional climate', of the mountainous region in the northwest of the province. What this refers to is fairly clear—the large difference in altitude between the valley floors and the plateaux and mountain tops results in a marked vertical gradation of climatic zones over a short horizontal difference. For instance, if you travel from the famous town of Lijiang to pretty Lugu Lake, you must cross the gorge of the Jinsha River, the name given to the upper reaches of the Yangtze.

Conclusions

What can we take from this discussion on environmental translation? Personally, the main conclusion that I would make, and here I am of course biased, is that it is an absolutely fascinating field, one where it is possible to learn much about the world around us. Secondly, and one that translators should already be aware of, is that we shouldn't put total faith in dictionaries. Dictionaries are compiled by people like you and me, with a finite knowledge of the world, and so are not infallible. The most up-to-date dictionary, too, is always out of date, as new words and phrases are constantly added to a language and old ones go out of fashion. And thirdly, research unfamiliar terms thoroughly—indeed, you will never cease to stumble over interesting facts and opinions during your journey through the lesser-travelled paths of the linguistic world.