06/26/2007

Sticky Rice for President!

I read an interesting article in The Boston Globe this morning on a proposal to mandate that communities with significant Chinese-speaking populations include Chinese transliterations of political candidates’ names on ballots.
The point the article makes – and illustrates with a number of amusing examples – is that this could inadvertently give some candidates an edge, while disadvantaging others. The reasoning is actually very simple: there’s no way to translate English names, which have neither meaning nor equivalents in Chinese, so generally they’re just written with similar-sounding characters. For example, Mit Romney’s first name could become 米特, pronounced mee-ta. The issue here is that whatever characters are chosen are going to have meaning. The 米 in 米特, for example, means sticky rice, and the 特 means special. Special rice dishes being a staple of Chinese cuisine, that might not be so bad, although rice, being cheap, is looked down on a bit as the poor man’s food, so really it could go either way.
It could be much worse though. Mayor Thomas Menino’s name, The Globe reports, could become “imbecile.” Or, even worse, “Barbarian Mud No Mind of His Own.” (I’m really not sure what the characters for that would be, I’d love to know.)
Barack Obama, on the other hand, could benefit if his name was on the ballot as “Oh Intellectual Overcome Profound Oh Gemstone,” one way the Globe article translates it.
The issue is valid: Chinese names, especially given names, do usually have meaning. Women’s names often compliment their beauty or virtue, while men’s names tend to reflect strength, intelligence, wealth and so on. However, I think cultural exchange has made transliteration a common enough practice that Chinese people are getting used to names transliterated from English that don’t make literal sense.
One of the sources quoted in the Globe article came up with an easy solution, in fact: just use the transliterations American Chinese-language media is already using. I decided to check out that option, and ran a few searches myself using a Chinese search engine.
My research reveals that the suggestion is a good one: most of the Mandarin-speaking world seems to have already agreed on what to call the candidates, at least the well known ones. Barack Obama is usually贝拉克 奥巴马,which roughly translates to “Valuables pull overcome Mysterious hope horse.” There are a couple variations, one using hope again as the first character, but his surname seems well established. And maybe meaningful too? He is a relative political newcomer, making him mysterious, although it might be a bit of a stretch to call him a dark horse. But, he did write a book titled “The Audacity of Hope.” So.
Mit Romney's name, though, actually seems to be sticky rice special. Actually, that's just his first name, poor guy. The most commonly used transliteration of his full name, 米特 罗姆尼, literally means "Sticky rice special Talkative governess nun." He might not win in Chinatown.
Hillary, by the way, already has an accepted Chinese name, since they had to call her something when she was the first lady. 希拉里 克林顿, as she is known, is made up of characters that, taken individually, roughly translate as “Rare pull inside Gram woods piece,” but at this point, it just translates to Hillary Clinton.
So maybe this issue isn’t such a big deal after all – the Chinese have already figured it out.

P.S. One of the more interesting articles I found in Chinese said that just by running, Obama has already made one of Hilary’s main selling points – the fact that she would be the first woman president of the U.S. – obsolete, because, if victorious, he would be the first black president. “Comparing the two,” it says, “the latter is naturally more attractive to voters.” I’m not sure where the author is coming from with that one, but it’s the first time I’ve heard it. All I know is Chinese attitudes toward both racial diversity and women are very different from ours… maybe I’ll write about that next.

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