大胡叔叔跟英语母语的Orianna和汉语母语的王尘尘 Happy customer Uncle Long beard with native English speaker Orianna and native Chinese speaker Cici
工作样本 Work samples:
包子，油条，多肉多油 buns, fried doughsticks, meat heavy
金鱼，蝌蚪，多多蔬菜 goldfish, tadpole, lots of veg
简体介绍 Simplified version:
我们的翻译为您的：学术／非学术的目的、展示自己的目的（比如简历、媒体发布会等等）、乐趣以及轻微颠覆性的目的提供服务。可译语言：汉语、英语、蒙古语、意大利语、希腊语、日语。价格面议，边喝边聊。有意者请联系： lianxi@homeshop.org.cn
Translation services for academic and non-academic purposes, forms of representation, fun and/or mild subversion. Languages offered, in most directions to and from: Chinese, English, Mongolian, Italian, Greek, Japanese. Reasonable rates. Please contact lianxi[at]homeshop[dot]org[cn] for inquiries.
Meta:
There are a few key figures that epitomise the zeitgeist, I think a few of you had speculated before, or at least sportsbabel and i on occasion, certain roles that have risen out of growing demand and/or fissures in the system, and next to the agents and hackers (more recent developments may also point to the rioter), we have not yet expounded upon the gentle maneuverings of the translator and acts of translation. Unlike many other things that we may so firmly believe in, like science, the happiness of fish or what is good and right, translation can only be based in the unconfirmable absolute, only the hearsay of peers who may deem you faithful enough, lying in a gap, what can only be roughly trustable by the ones in power who hire you.
And you? Just make sure you get paid 50% up front, and what have you got to lose? The translator is servant, perhaps, but these days we all know games of wit and cunning go far beyond elementary economics. We are at your service, and maybe even where it is not written in red chalk, there is a small feeling of up rising that we say maybe you should just go ahead and overlook, 嘿嘿… The translator is most efficacious the more imperceptibly he/she fits into the conversation, yet always with relation to listeners and foremost, the act of listening. The translator’s voice, according to a certain ethics, should remain as quiet as possible, such that written and spoken words are shared in as large a ratio of sound to original meaning as possible. And while we must acknowledge the impossibility of a 1:1, perse, it is in the multitude of fractions there below that we come upon all the real uncertainties at hand: the betrayal of context, incoherency, nervous laughter here and there.
The elitism of bilingualism should always be countered in light of such inevitable failure, as we can never learn enough, and its power always rests upon a precipice of meaning gone astray. These measures of maneuverability and risk characterise all of our leading players (see the recent Žižek article for more thoughts on the rioter), though intent and affect vary to extremes. Among them, it seems possible that it is the translator who may strive for invisibility to the greatest degree—as opposed to the hacker who must remain anonymous as author but strives for the greatest possible effect, and the agent whose effects may not remain but must work productively as a skimmer of surplus, facilitating and enhancing the means towards an end. A sense of value judgement should perhaps never predicate the translator’s work, but as per any freelancer’s dilemma, we must be able to bear it, at least, and especially in the case of literature, be able to find the aesthetics appropriate to certain affects in their original form. To find an aesthetics without judgement is crucial here—paradoxes notwithstanding… a case for the tensions between aesthetics and invisibility made active in a course of doing, creating. Work, motherfucker, work.
时间 posted on: 1 September 2011 | 
发布者 author: 
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September 7th, 2011 - 21:24
“Is a translation meant for readers who do not understand the original? This would seem to explain adequately the divergence of their standing in the realm of art. Moreover, it seems to be the only conceivable reason for saying “the same thing” repeatedly. For what does a literary work “say”? What does it communicate? It tells very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information — hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information — as even a poor translator will admit — the unfathomable, the mysterious, the “poetic,” something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet? This, actually, is the cause of another characteristic of inferior translation, which consequently we may define as the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content.”
I suppose there are a few types of translator, some invisible, and some whose visibility is the visibility of the difference between languages…
“While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds. ”
A translation, from this point of view, is supposed to challenge and transform the bases for its own language, demolishing and fracturing certain of its givens, but judged according to its own language, but curiously by this process that is anything but smooth, reflecting the “pure language.”
“A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not black its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.”
But does the service of the translator differ from the task, in proximity or approach to “pure language”? Pure language, an orientation point whose existence we may well query today, or a goal we may already be in the grips of, if we install its meaning in what has been called the general intellect?
“And that which seeks to represent, to produce itself in the evolving of languages, is that very nucleus of pure language. Though concealed and fragmentary, it is an active force in life as the symbolized thing itself, whereas it inhabits linguistic creations only in symbolized form. While that ultimate essence, pure language, in the various tongues is tied only to linguistic elements and their changes, in linguistic creations it is weighted with a heavy, alien meaning. To relieve it of this, to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized, to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of translation. In this pure language — which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages — all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.”
quotes from Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”