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http://world.people.com.cn/GB/57507/8963129.html
从诞生到弘传宇内仅数十日内，草泥马已经响彻全球。中国与世界再次联为一体，无数各种语言的嘴巴，或灵巧或笨拙地重复着这三个响亮的字音。
中国的影响今天既深且远，即以网络时代而论，有关中国的新闻也远远越出那些不知是谁主办的论坛和博客，也不限于YOUTUBE这种随便谁都能贴上东西的所谓WEB2.0。俺们中国人，现在弄点儿什么还不是世界顶级新闻？
在谷歌的新闻搜索里随手打进grass mud horse，几十上百的结果逢涌而出。人家谷哥可不是一般的哥，被这哥列为新闻选项的全是正八经的媒体。《圣路易斯邮报》、《大西洋在线》、《纽约时报》……全部对草泥马进行专文报道，多一半配图，有得还有多版本的视频。
登峰造极的标志是《纽约时报》3月12日的长篇评论，居然又配图又配视频歌曲。雄壮浪漫的《草泥马之歌》响彻纽约时报的网站：“宽广的马勒戈壁 景色多壮丽，勇敢的朝尼族人民 歌颂著你，俊健的草泥马多么的美丽”，三亿美国人民争先浏览，奥巴马与希拉里共同沉醉……
当整个世界为草泥马兴奋不已时，上帝真主佛祖以及所有的诸神，都将感动于盛况而原谅异域花样百出的解读。毕竟神兽已经出世，不同的人将收获不同的馈赠。《纽约时报》把神兽与中国政府联系起来，再次为美国CNN水平的新闻素养提供证明。
别问我为什么直接批评中国政府的俯卧撑与躲猫猫，美国顶级媒体不进行报道，偏偏钟情于神兽——这是低估美国传媒从业人员的幽默感，或者高估他们的汉语理解能力。另一个选项，是提问者寻找草泥马，请神兽回答《纽约时报》为何选择性报道中国新闻。
同样要客观对待异域的翻译水平。相对博大精深的中文，英语很难表达过于巧妙的思维。草泥马译成英文，grass mud horse诞生之后，谐音、脑力、夸张、传奇，一切都不再存在。形神俱失是宏传宇内的必然代价。理解吧，异域没有上下五千年的古老文明，没有几亿智慧的网民，没有炎黄子孙的胸怀与智慧。
真的真的很让西人劳神。草泥马，还有玛丽戈壁、卧槽泥马这些兄弟，神马东西、吾巢这些近亲……可怜的洋翻译们，又要从黄昏忙到黎明……
友情赠送，NYTimes原文
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html?_r=4&em
动画版 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Fl3q5gZNc
A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors
BEIJING — Since its first unheralded appearance in January on aChinese Web page, the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than aphenomenon.
 
A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter millionmore views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more.Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals arewriting treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The storyof the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab hasspread far and wide across the Chinese online community.
Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, soundsvery much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely thepoint.
The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’sauthoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as animpish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has notmerely made government censors lookridiculous, although it has surelydone that.
It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanchthe flow of information over the Internet — a project on which theChinese government already has expended untold riches, and writtencountless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’slargest cyber-community.
Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, huntingfor words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory orseditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can beblocked within minutes.
Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the Universityof California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors ChineseWeb sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “hasbecome an icon of resistance to censorship.”
“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenileresponse to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that thevast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars tousually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows howstrongly this expression resonates.”
Wang Xiaofeng, a journalist and blogger based in Beijing, said inan interview that the little animal neatly illustrates the futility ofcensorship. “When people have emotions or feelings they want toexpress, they need a space or channel,” he said. “It is like a waterflow — if you block one direction, it flows to other directions, oroverflows. There’s got to be an outlet.”
China’s online population has always endured censorship, but theoversight increased markedly in December, after a pro-democracymovement led by highly regarded intellectuals, Charter 08, released anonline petition calling for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly onpower.
Shortly afterward, government censors began a campaign, ostensiblyagainst Internet pornography and other forms of deviance. Bymid-February, the government effort had shut down more than 1,900 Websites and 250 blogs — not only overtly pornographic sites, but alsoonline discussion forums, instant-message groups and even cellphonetext messages in which political and other sensitive issues werebroached.
Among the most prominent Web sites that were closed down wasbullog.com, a widely read forum whose liberal-minded bloggers hadwritten in detail about Charter 08. China Digital Times, Mr. Xiao’smonitoring project at the University of California, called it “the mostvicious crackdown in years.”
It was against this background that the grass-mud horse andseveral mythical companions appeared in early January on the ChineseInternet portal Baidu. The creatures’ names, as written in Chinese,were innocent enough. But much as “bear” and “bare” have differentmeanings in English, their spoken names were double entendres withinarguably dirty second meanings.
So while “grass-mud horse” sounds like a nasty curse in Chinese,its written Chinese characters are completely different, and itsmeaning —taken literally — is benign. Thus the beast not only hasdodged censors’ computers, but has also eluded the government’s own banon so-called offensive behavior.
As depicted online, the grass-mud horse seems innocent enough at the start.
An alpaca-like animal — in fact, the videos show alpacas — it livesin a desert whose name resembles yet another foul word. The horses are“courageous, tenacious and overcome the difficult environment,” aYouTube song about them says.
But they face a problem: invading “river crabs” that are devouringtheir grassland. In spoken Chinese, “river crab” sounds very much like“harmony,” which in China’s cyberspace has become a synonym forcensorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts have been“harmonized” — a term directly derived from President Hu Jintao’sregular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a harmonioussociety.
In the end, one song says, the horses are victorious: “Theydefeated the river crabs in order to protect their grassland; rivercrabs forever disappeared from the Ma Le Ge Bi,” the desert.
The online videos’ scenes of alpacas happily romping to theDisney-style sounds of a children’s chorus quickly turn shocking —then, to many Chinese, hilarious — as it becomes clear that the songsfairly burst with disgusting language.
To Chinese intellectuals, the songs’ message is clearlysubversive, a lesson that citizens can flout authority even as theyappear to follow the rules. “Its underlying tone is: I know you do notallow me to say certain things. See, I am completely cooperative,right?” the Beijing Film Academy professor and social critic CuiWeiping wrote in her own blog. “I am singing a cute children’s song — Iam a grass-mud horse! Even though it is heard by the entire world, youcan’t say I’ve broken the law.”
In an essay titled “I am a grass-mud horse,” Ms. Cui compared theanti-smut campaign to China’s 1983 “anti-spiritual pollution campaign,”another crusade against pornography whose broader aim was to crushWestern-influenced critics of the ruling party.
Another noted blogger, the Tsinghua University sociologist GuoYuhua, called the grass-mud horse allusions “weapons of the weak” — thetitle of a book by the Yale political scientist James Scott describinghow powerless peasants resisted dictatorial regimes.
Of course, the government could decide to delete all Internetreferences to the phrase “grass-mud horse,” an easy task for itscensorship software. But while China’s cybercitizens may be weak, theyare also ingenious.
The Shanghai blogger Uln already has an idea. Blogging tongue incheek — or perhaps not — he recently suggested that online democracyadvocates stop referring to Charter 08 by its name, and instead choosea different moniker. “Wang,” perhaps. Wang is a ubiquitous surname, andweeding out the subversive Wangs from the harmless ones might meltcircuits in even the censors’ most powerful computer.
Zhang Jing contributed research.
PS.文中提到的07+1=宪章宪章是个很SB的反共言论
PS2.拒绝政治
PS3.买不起
[ 本帖最后由 慵懒悠悠 于 2009-3-17 11:09 编辑 ] |
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