Thought Portal

Netflix's lavish new adaptation of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem is the latest 'translation' of one of this century's best, and best-selling, sci-fi novels. In this episode, we track the role of translation—on screen and on the page—in the global rise of Chinese sci-fi. Our guide is reporter and sci-fi aficionada Lydia Emmanouilidou who talks with several people involved in the Chinese literary scene, notably The Three-Body Problem's English translator Ken Liu.

Ibrahim Nasrallah (trans. Huda Fakhreddine)

I was silent and nothing came of it. I spoke and nothing came of it. I cursed, I apologized, and nothing came of it. I was busy, I pretended to be busy…and nothing. I sat, I walked, I ran. I shivered and I warmed up. Nothing. I was parched until I cracked. I drank until I drowned, and nothing came of it. I crumbled like a fetus, like the father, the siblings, and the mother. I was then gathered in a shroud made of old curtains, and nothing came of it. I stumbled more than I could stand but then I stood up, and nothing came of it. I prayed until, like a prophet, I became a verse in a holy book, I rowed until I reached hell, I beseeched and begged …and nothing. I raged, I calmed, I remembered what was once distant, and I forgot what was always close. I befriended a monster, and I fought a monster. I died young and sometimes survived. In both times, I grew old from all that I had seen, but nothing came of it. I charged, I withdrew, I fought the wind when it blew, And reconciled with the waves when I rose and raged. Among the horses my heart was a horse, in the night my heart was a night, and nothing came of it. I ate, I hungered, I vomited, and nothing came of it. I embraced my shadow, and I chastised it and then I chastised myself. I greeted a woman lost in the streets. I fought with a man and his smile nearby, and with a bird that sang briefly in the garden, and nothing came of it.

I closed all the windows in my house and opened them. I wrote words on death when it is merciful, death when it is futile, death when it is hell, death when it is the only way…at last, death when it is gentle and light, death when it is heavy and dark, and nothing came of it. I wrote about the river and the sea, about tomorrow and the sun, and nothing came of it. I wrote about oppression and depravity – purity too. I slept without a bite of bread. I dreamt without dreams. I woke up not missing my hands or feet or reflection in the mirror or the thing I call my soul. I died and lived. I lit myself on fire. I put myself out with my own ashes, and nothing came of it.

I am all these elements, O God: fire, earth, wind, and water. Their fifth is a pain that blind songs can’t see, their sixth is this immense loneliness, and their seventh, since my slaughter, is blood. When I burned, I inhabited the letters of my free name like a butterfly: P         A         L         E          S        T        I         N         E When my roof was suddenly blown off into the sky and with it a wall, a window, and the youngest of my children, I gathered myself in the G and the A and the Z and the A. I became GAZA. A thousand warplanes circled and hit me. I collapsed and collapsed again, and then rose in a scream. I called out, but nothing came of it. Nothing came of it. Nothing came of it. I lost faith and believed, lost faith and believed again, and lost faith and believed and… nothing came of it, nothing came of it.

And the filthy world asks me: All this…what of it?

Imagine you are in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language and your small child unexpectedly starts to have a fever seizure. You take them to the hospital, and the doctors use an online translator to let you know that your kid is going to be OK. But “your child is having a seizure” accidentally comes up in your mother tongue is “your child is dead.”

This specific example is a very real possibility, according to a 2014 study published in the British Medical Journal about the limited usefulness of AI-powered machine translation in communications between patients and doctors. (Because it’s a British publication, the actual hypothetical quote was “your child is fitting.” Sometimes we need American-British translation, too.)

Machine translation tools like Google Translate can be super handy, and Big Tech often promotes them as accurate and accessible tools that’ll break down many intra-linguistic barriers in the modern world. But the truth is that things can go awfully wrong. Misplaced trust in these MT tools’ ability is already leading to their misuse by authorities in high-stake situations, according to experts—ordering a coffee in a foreign country or translating lyrics can only do so much harm, but think about emergency situations involving firefighters, police, border patrol, or immigration. And without proper regulation and clear guidelines, it could get worse.

"Warning: read and keep," says the piece of paper inside Kinder Surprise Eggs, in 34 languages; yet most people do neither thing. But sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris did read and keep it, and study what the egg is trying to tell us: about Kinder Egg toy safety, yes, but also about multilingualism, about an object that says 'yes!' but the warning says 'no!', about the signs of human idiosyncracy that show themselves even in a mandatory corporate message.

It is true that translators find themselves in the position of putting up the sign “don’t shoot the piano player,” as they are so easily and so often criticized. And here I will, immodestly, cite again Mark Strand: “I have been translated in maybe 20 different languages, and I have read in maybe 40-50 different countries,” he said to me, “and every time, after the reading, someone would come up to me and say something like, ‘I love your poems, but I could have translated them better.’ That has never happened in Italy.” And one of the greatest compliments I ever received was from a ten-year-old boy, son of Anglophone friends. The child was born in Italy and is perfectly bilingual: after a reading of Moira’s poems and my translations—to which his mother dragged him along imagining that he would be terribly bored—he came up saying something like, “Damiano is very good, because he doesn’t use the same word, he uses the right word.”

More than a service, Framasoft is launching today a movement, an art of living, a political program which can be summed up in one word: fart .

"So that's it, Framasoft has prouted a cable…?" "

Yes.

It must be said that between one half fig reconfinement mimolette (whose rules vary between Kamoulox and sing sloubi), dreadful dramas cynical and morbid recovered by obsessed · es of solutionnisme compulsive dramatization of electoral games including consequences may not amuse anyone ... How to keep the mind healthy?

The solution appeared to little Pierre-Yves, 42, while the Twitter application dragged him into an infinite scroll. Anxiety tweets passed before his eyes until: Prout .

I then cracked a little nervously, he testifies. I found it so great that the RTBF site (the Belgian equivalent of France Television) ends up with tens of thousands of pages ending with "Prout".

Justice nowhere…? Prout everywhere!

We could give you a long, intelligent and academic essay on the virtues of Prout in the face of surveillance capitalism. (beware, this is a threat: don't push us or we write it, eh!)

We would certainly mention Brandolini's law , which explains that it is always less tiring to say bullshit than to deny the bullshit that has just been said. Do you also find it exhausting to answer a person who denies global warming, says that the earth is flat and that all opinions - even the Nazis - are the same…? Fart.

Our praise of the Prut would necessarily mention the Overton window . When parties, media, groups, etc. let some members say shocking enormities, it is so that their nauseating idea stinks a little less in comparison. Are politicians embarking on a new Lépine competition for extreme ideas? Prout, prout and re-prout!

Vulgar, the fart? Nay! It is even quite an art  ! The fart is unstoppable, because he lets go of a case of irreverence to reveal the absurdity of those who take themselves a bit too seriously. The fart is subversive, it blows a wind of "I freak you out". By its very nature, the fart is elusive. Her vengeful scent comes and goes. Without leaving a trace.

“Isn't the fart nihilist, depoliticizing or aquoibonist? " No ! Its matter, if one can speak of matter, is so ethereal that it bears no weight other than that of affirming the fa (r) tuity of the one who generates it. We can even complete by paraphrasing Victor Hugo in one of his finest speeches  : “The fart, as an epiphoneme , belongs to its author, but as an act, it belongs - the word is not too vast - to the human race. ".

Finally, the fart is uncensurable. "Prout" is not an insult, it is a natural function. Fart.

Prout as a weapon of social self-defense

It's a phrase known on the Internet: arguing with trolls is like playing chess against a pigeon. No matter your level, the pigeon will just knock over all the pieces, shit on the board, and proudly strut like he won.

The best way out is to cry out: “Aha! I see you ! You are a pigeon! And pigeons don't play chess, so I don't play with you! ". But, in our experience, such a decline is rare. And if it does, the pigeon takes you into a new debate of "but why are you calling me a troll?" ". So: fart.

The fart is a way to let go of the masks, to cry out this "I see you!" To the pigeon who wanted to put us in check. Our media landscape (which includes social media) is filled with bloated postures of authority, crappy rhetoric, foul-smelling manipulation techniques, and winds of disinformation. Those who fart to have an opinion all the time: we see you. Fart.

The world has never needed Prouts so much. Because in fact, we have no place in the debate as an individual. Because social media is a place where everyone is yelling and no one is listening. Because, even worse, to yell and see that nothing moves when there are thousands (millions) to be in disagreement only exacerbates the hatred of "the other", of the one who does not hear. . Better to prouter.

Framaprout , digital tools to prouter in freedom

We, when we start farting our headphones, we do it well. On Framaprout.org , you have at your disposal:

Proutify

, the browser extension that will take you to the web

Proutify is an extension for your browser that you will find here . Installation is easier on Firefox , but it remains manual for Chrome (because it is more likely than to create a dev Google account!). Once installed, Proutify will replace a whole host of names and phrases with their Proutesque version. Because life is absurd.

The prouts of Team Meme

The # TeamMémé struck again . Or Prouté. In fact, the team is on the verge of overwork. Its members were more successful than an Ariégeois who had just won a Mounjetada tasting competition.

We couldn't use all of them to illustrate this article, so we've prepared a gallery of gastric memes for you to download and share everywhere around you.

The prouts of Team Meme

The # TeamMémé struck again . Or Prouté. In fact, the team is on the verge of overwork. Its members were more successful than an Ariégeois who had just won a Mounjetada tasting competition.

We couldn't use all of them to illustrate this article, so we've prepared a gallery of gastric memes for you to download and share everywhere around you.

The good old handcrafted fart

There are times when you can't take it any longer. Where we are tired · e to take the foam of days in the teeth, trotted by each new wave of indignation. If this happens to you, just answer: fart.

The good old handcrafted fart, that's all that is true. That's five keys on your keyboard. Six if you make it a hashtag. Go ahead, let go, you will see: it relieves.

The good old handcrafted fart

There are times when you can't take it any longer. Where we are tired · e to take the foam of days in the teeth, trotted by each new wave of indignation. If this happens to you, just answer: fart.

The good old handcrafted fart, that's all that is true. That's five keys on your keyboard. Six if you make it a hashtag. Go ahead, let go, you will see: it relieves.

Garous Abdolmalekian, trans. Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

***right now American society glorifies the pursuit of profit, which often manifests as granting corporations more power and reducing their accountability. The idea that AIs will be cold and unfeeling is a product, I think, of our fear of technology, and one of the reasons we fear technology is the way it’s been deployed against us by capitalism, the ultimate cold and unfeeling machine. 

***Before the word “scientist” was coined, individuals who studied the universe were called natural philosophers, and a lot of them were members of the clergy. They celebrated God’s glory by gaining a greater understanding of the world he created, and when they made a scientific breakthrough, what they experienced was akin to religious awe. Some people feel that wonder is incompatible with comprehension and requires mystery, but there is a long tradition of wonder in scientific research. ***I think science and religion could more peacefully coexist if we could agree that they are trying to answer different questions; science is investigating the question, “how does the universe work?” while religion is investigating the question, “how should I live my life?” To my mind, it should be possible to separate these two. Deciding how to be a good person is not something that should depend on the results of a lab experiment. Of course, I recognize that it’s easy for me to take this position because I’m an atheist. People are always going to disagree about what is the right way to live, but I’d prefer it if they didn’t try to justify their arguments with assertions about the age of the universe or the origin of species. 

***In theory, science fiction readers should be interested in different ways of looking at things, and science fiction translated from other languages definitely offers that. It may take a little time for American readers to adjust to foreign styles of storytelling.

***Elsewhere she says, “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.” Writing isn’t fun for me, but it’s something I have to do.

***Back when I was a teenager, I was often accused of being a cynic, and my reply was always that I was a pessimist, not a cynic. The difference being that, while I often expected bad things to happen, I believed people were basically decent, or at least upfront about their motives. Since then, I’ve seen—both from a distance and up close—how often people’s behavior is rooted in malice or hypocrisy, so it’s fair to say that I’m a cynic now. (They say no one is more cynical than a disillusioned idealist.) Many writers draw on such experiences as fuel for their fiction, but my imagination doesn’t seem to work that way. It’s not so much that I have to actively struggle against cynicism in my work as it is that I’m currently less interested in stories that reinforce cynicism.

***Faulkner famously said, “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” I love science, but if we’re talking about fiction rather than nonfiction, science isn’t enough to sustain a narrative. Science fiction uses science to illuminate the human condition, and that’s what makes it worth reading and writing, in my view.

For the past 21 years, as a lead operator at the California Institute of Technology’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), Yellowfly’s son, Corey Gray, has helped to run machines that detect gravitational waves. These violent ripples travel through spacetime like waves created by a pebble dropped into a pond. They can be caused by the collision of two black holes or the collapse of supernova, and there are even some still rippling around from the birth of the universe—you know, small things.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves over a century ago in his general theory of relativity, but scientists only first observed these ripples in 2015, thanks to LIGO detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, where Gray works. (It seems like we’re always going to be catching up to Einstein). When Gray, who is a member of the Siksika Nation of Alberta, Canada, found out about this major scientific milestone, he began to think about the press releases. They would no doubt be translated into widely spoken languages—French, Japanese, Mandarin. “That’s when I thought it would be freaking cool to get my mom involved and translate this news into Blackfoot,” Gray says, adding that he isn’t quite fluent in the language himself. “This way she would be a poet for Einstein and astrophysics. A code-talker for gravitational waves.”

Though she now lives in southern California, Yellowfly grew up on a reserve in southern Alberta, Canada. In 1957, she enrolled in the Crowfoot Indian Residential School, as was required by Canadian law. These boarding schools were a long and cruel tradition in Canada, where governments and churches pursued a policy of cultural genocide to stamp out the culture of First Nations people, according to a 2015 report from the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yellowfly remembers that the first French word her mother learned during her own boarding school experience was “sauvage,” the slur the nuns lobbed at their indigenous pupils.

“The school wanted to get rid of everything that made us native,” Yellowfly says. “The language, the religion, the ideology—everything that was Blackfoot.” If the nuns caught children speaking their native language, the children weren’t allowed to return home over the weekend, and could be physically punished. Yellowfly remembers how she and her classmates developed an underground whisper network in which they spoke to each other in Blackfoot whenever the nuns were out of sight. These small acts of rebellion helped Yellowfly cling to her identity and language.

Language resources don't just appear. People have to decide to create them, and those people need to be fed and watered and educated and housed and supported, whether that's by governments or by companies or by the kind of personal wealth that lets individuals take on time-consuming intellectual hobbies. Creating parallel corpora and other language resources takes years, if it happens at all, and cost tens of millions of dollars per language.

“The realism of science fiction is different from the realism of other genres; it is a realism infused with revolutionary idealism because its intended reader is the youth.”

Our stories are written primarily for a Chinese audience. The problems we care about and ponder are the problems facing all of us sharing this plot of land. These problems, in turn, are connected in a thousand complicated ways with the collective fate of all of humanity.

In reading Western science fiction, Chinese readers discover the fears and hopes of Man, the modern Prometheus, for his destiny, which is also his own creation. Perhaps Western readers can also read Chinese science fiction and experience an alternative, Chinese modernity and be inspired to imagine an alternative future.

Science fiction—to borrow the words of Gilles Deleuze—is a literature always in the state of becoming, a literature that is born on the frontier—the frontier between the known and unknown, magic and science, dream and reality, self and other, present and future, East and West—and renews itself as the frontier shifts and migrates.

...Maybe now, after all the media coverage of my work, interviewers might finally start asking cisgender men about how gender impacts their work. It would be about time....

“The Greek text is much better, as literature and as ethics, for not limiting its narrative focus to Odysseus, and for not presenting him as a model for unquestioning adulation, and I hated the fact that so many English versions seemed to want to dumb it down in these ways. I love the Odyssey for its multiplicity, and I wanted a translation that was truthful to that; I could see that that translation didn’t exist, so I needed to create it.”