{"id":21,"date":"2009-03-22T19:25:25","date_gmt":"2009-03-22T23:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nscadesign.ca\/mleblanc\/?p=21"},"modified":"2013-09-08T09:08:09","modified_gmt":"2013-09-08T12:08:09","slug":"so-what-the-is-%e2%80%9c%e6%b1%82%e7%9f%a5%e6%ac%b2%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.generaleccentric.net\/?p=21","title":{"rendered":"So what the #*%! is \u201c\u6c42\u77e5\u6b32\u201d ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"Meeting
Meeting with a student in Fuzhou, October, 2008<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I go to China to interview students<\/strong> who are applying to NSCAD’s Master of Design program, I look at their portfolios and I talk to them. What I’m looking for is what I call \u201cintellectual curiosity.\u201d But when I tell them that this is the quality that will best determine their success in this program, they give me the old \u2018thousand-yard stare.\u2019 It just isn’t a concept that most students have grasped in their English instruction.<\/p>\n

So I went to Google Translate<\/a>, and typed in \u201cintellectual curiosity.\u201d It came back with the Chinese characters. When I translated it back, it returned \u201cthirst for knowledge.\u201d Well, it’s not exactly what I’m looking for, but it\u2019s certainly better than I expected.<\/p>\n

Character by character, \u6c42 means \u201cseek,\u201d \u77e5 means \u201cknow,\u201d and \u6b32 means \u201cappetite,\u201d \u201clonging,\u201d or \u201cwish.\u201d<\/p>\n

How did I know if it was a correct translation? I asked my Chinese friends:<\/p>\n

\u2026I am not sure if this is exactly what I want, because a designer looks at the world differently than, maybe, a scientist. A scientist is happy to know things, while a designer is happy to get approximate answers<\/strong>. Maybe for a designer, it is a “thirst to ask questions”?\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is this translation accurate, or is there a better way to express it?<\/p>\n

Faye Wong wrote:<\/p>\n

In Chinese there are also different feelings in one word.
\nI do not think “thirst for knowledge” is a good translation for \u6c42\u77e5\u6b32. \u6c42\u77e5\u6b32 is kind like curiosity, and kind of like a desire of “why”\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Carol Chen wrote:<\/p>\n

\u2026 I think google has given you a right answer. \u6c42\u77e5\u6b32 means “thirst for knowledge”, and it also express that one’s eager to learn something new, or someone desire to learn some knowledge. These are my thoughts, and you might also look at others to make sure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Song Keyu wrote:<\/p>\n

“\u6c42\u77e5\u6b32” is not an accurate translation of “intellectual curiosity”, considering to the exact reason that you talked about. But I couldn’t come up with a better one at this moment, at least not a wildly-used one like this.<\/p>\n

But there are some good qualities about this phrase that make it closer to to what you want to say than other translations:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It is an ancient Chinese expression, which actually feels “intellectual”. (Ancient intellectuals were not scientists.)<\/li>\n
  2. Though the word “\u77e5” means “knowledge” nowadays, but in the past, it equaled to the word “\u667a”, which means “intellectual” and “wisdom”.<\/li>\n
  3. It is so widely used that the meaning expands to a very large range, so when people say it, they are not specifically focusing on the a scientific respect.<\/li>\n
  4. It is very percise and beautiful.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n

     <\/p>\n

    I should add that Song asked her father, a noted novelist in Hunan, about this question:<\/p>\n

    My dad didn’t find a better word either. He agrees with me maybe you should use that one. We discussed some new sayings of that meaning, which are literal translations, but they are all kind of lame.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    So how did Google get it so right?<\/h3>\n

    According to the Google Translate FAQ<\/a> uses what they call \u201cMachine Statistical Translation:\u201d<\/p>\n

    Our system takes a different approach: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We’ve achieved very good results in research evaluations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    And where did they get those billions of words of text that are translation correlations? According to Reuters<\/a>, they went to the United Nations and the European Union. Both of these institutions have armies of translators that convert text from English and French to other languages, resulting in hundreds of thousands of laws, reports, and legal judgements. Google obtained as many different documents as possible and ran them through their translation software. Somewhere in a UN document is the phrase \u201cintellectual curiosity,\u201d and some wise apparatchik has skillfully translated it into Mandarin.<\/p>\n

    Thank you, U.N., thank you, Google.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    How do you translate \u201cintellectual curiosity\u201d into Mandarin\u2014and know that it is accurate?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4,7],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","tag-mandarin","tag-nscad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.generaleccentric.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.generaleccentric.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.generaleccentric.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.generaleccentric.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.generaleccentric.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/blog.generaleccentric.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29,"href":"https:\/\/blog.generaleccentric.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.generaleccentric.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.generaleccentric.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.generaleccentric.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}