Navigating the Maze of Translating Military Aviation Manufacturers' Names: A Look at Foreign Transliteration

Monday, January 8, 2024｜Foreign transliteration

Today, I talked with a few friends who are also interested in military aviation and talked about the names and translation methods of several major aviation manufacturers that are engaged in military aviation.

When it comes to the aerospace defense industry, the United States has Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, etc.; the former Soviet Union and current Russia have MiG, Sukai, Tupolev, etc.; the United Kingdom There is British Aerospace Systems (BAe Systems); France has Airbus Defense Group, Matra, and Dassault; Italy has the famous artillery manufacturer OTO; Japan has Mitsubishi and Shinmeiwa Industries; South Korea has KAI; China has Han Soar.

In addition to these manufacturers using abbreviations (OTO, KAI) or Japanese, Taiwanese and other companies whose names are originally Chinese characters and do not need to be translated, the names of other manufacturers will have more or less translation problems, including cross-strait or other factors. resulting in translation differences.

For example, aerospace (aviation and space) is called aerospace on the other side, so obviously the translation of British Aerospace will be different in Chinese Simplified Chinese; the translation of major defense manufacturers in Russia and other countries with Cyrillic letters will be This is because Taiwanese traditional Chinese is mostly translated in English spelling, and Chinese simplified Chinese is mostly translated in Russian, resulting in discrepancies (for example, Su Kai will become Sukhoi).

In addition, the manufacturer’s abbreviation of the model number will be spelled out in Taiwan using English letters to spell out the model number of the Soviet weapons, while in Simplified Chinese, the Russian letters will be used to convert the words (such as Tu-160 and Tu-160) according to the Chinese Communist Party’s education laws. .

Regarding the handling of these terms, the author recently happened to be reading a book related to fighter jets, and faced another situation where there may be differences in usage between the two sides: abbreviation.

The abbreviation is something that is difficult to determine whether it is a Chinese term. On the one hand, under the basic doctrine of “simplification” in Chinese bamboo slips, they are indeed more motivated than us to do something – especially excessive simplification; but on the other hand, Wang Wei and Meng Haoran, both pastoral poets, are also called Wang Meng, Li Bai and Du Fu are collectively called Li Du. These are not things that only existed after the establishment of the Chinese Communist regime.

So in recent years, when the author noticed that Northrop Grumman began to be referred to as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin was called Lockheed Martin, I was very distressed. This may be Chinese usage, or it may not be. The worst part is that the two merged companies were established too late (Northrop Grumman 1994, Lockheed Martin 1995) and cannot be inferred from the time when the word began to appear. (Most Chinese terms entered Taiwan after at least 2013, with a few from 2005 to 2013. Those earlier than this are rare but not impossible).

In addition, there are some strange transliteration issues, such as British Aerospace being transliterated as “Bei Yi”. This does not comply with the transliteration rules of the Chinese Communist Party’s education authorities, and this company originally had their own translated name (British Aerospace) in Chinese terms. This is not enough to completely rule out the possibility of Chinese language, but it should be enough to significantly reduce the chance.

So what should we do when we encounter this situation? The author can only suggest that you look for the names of these manufacturers to see if there is any usage of “definitely Taiwanese or Chinese terms”. If you can find a usage that is definitely Taiwanese Traditional Chinese and there is no trace of influence from Chinese terms, then you can use it with confidence; if you can find a usage that is definitely Chinese terms, you can also use it to compare it with the usage that you don’t know whether you should use or not. Try to Find the more likely explanations.

Tuesday, January 9, 2024 | Satellite

The biggest news on January 9 was, of course, the Chinese Communist Party’s launch of a satellite, which caused SMS alarms to go off across Taiwan. Since we are talking about satellites, let’s talk about a special usage that often occurs in the game industry, which is one of the translation texts that the author is engaged in.

Satellites refer to celestial bodies like the moon or Mimas that orbit planets, but in fact, the “satellites” we discuss most of the time today refer to artificial satellites. The number of man-made satellites launched into Earth orbit has already exceeded the total number of natural satellites in the entire solar system. Therefore, it is probably inevitable that man-made satellites have overshadowed the term “satellite” as its abbreviation. But what we are going to talk about today is a different kind of “satellite”.

In recent years, due to the development of the Chinese gaming community and even its own gaming industry, specialized Chinese terms have begun to appear in the gaming industry. “Satellite” refers to a kind of notice, especially a suggestive notice (such as briefly or semi-hiddenly showing future new content, characters and other related information). For example, if a game has a new unexplained character in the pictures and texts released on social media three months ago, and this character is added in the update today, the game community on the other side will It said that the picture and text three months ago was “releasing (the new character’s) satellite”, and today’s update is “the satellite has landed.”

In fact, from the perspective of the way artificial satellites operate, such terms are really strange. An artificial satellite enters operation almost immediately after launch. It is not a “preview” of new functions and services. Of course, an artificial satellite will never land. It will only enter orbit and remain in orbit until its life is exhausted or its mission is over. After completion, it will reenter the atmosphere and burn up, and will never touch the earth’s surface again from launch to the end of its life. Therefore, this is a coined word that does not conform to the original meaning of “satellite” and its operating conditions.

The term “Taiwan” is currently only used in places that are heavily influenced by the Chinese community (such as games produced on the other side). In fact, even if this term is viewed in the more formal Chinese Simplified Chinese language, it may be considered a mistake. usage. In this case, the author should classify “satellite” as “a preview of new features and new content for games or similar products” as a Category B Chinese term.

Wednesday, January 10, 2024 | Quantifiers

Today, our country’s Ministry of National Defense announced an interesting new policy: they want to unify the quantifiers used by the national army regarding military product units when writing official documents. “For example, a rifle is a ‘branch’ rather than a handle; a warship is a ‘ship’ rather than a weapon.”

We usually use “handle” for firearms in our daily life. Why the Ministry of Defense decided to do the opposite? It is difficult to comment until the author finds a complete list, but today let’s talk about things like quantifiers.

First, let’s start with whether there are quantifiers. In recent years, Chinese terms used in the invasion often omit quantifiers, such as “a man went to that place (a man)” or “that is just an adjective”. This kind of omission is most common when the numeral is “one”, but the author has also seen it used for more than two. The author suspects that this is a modification to “conform” with English, because English often does not have quantifiers.

Of course, there are also situations where quantifiers are omitted in inherent Traditional Chinese usage, including in law (this is to avoid limiting the scope of reference due to different quantifiers. For example, there is a patent saying that a certain machine has “a” braking mechanism, What if the person who infringed the patent claims that he used “one piece”?), nominalization (“three primary colors” of “light has three primary colors” is a clause, and “three primary colors” is a noun), classical Chinese or special usage , there are even some nouns that do not require quantifiers. However, the above situations are obviously not traditional usage in Traditional Chinese and can omit quantifiers, but are new creations in Simplified Chinese.

In addition, there are more quantifiers in Traditional Chinese and fewer quantifiers in Simplified Chinese. It is obvious that Simplified Chinese has a stronger tendency to consolidate many quantifiers into a few types than Traditional Chinese. Taiwan’s Traditional Chinese also has the simplification of quantifiers, but it’s not as obvious as Simplified Chinese. For example, when we don’t know what quantifier to use, we always use “ge” and so on. What’s more troublesome about this situation is that some “unifications” are simply because simplified Chinese characters reduce the number of usable characters, so it is necessary to distinguish between this situation and a real artificially simplified situation.

After excluding the above two situations, there is another rare situation where for the same thing, Chinese Simplified Chinese uses different quantifiers from Taiwan Traditional Chinese for unknown reasons. For example, for a watch on the other side, you can see “block” as the quantifier. In Taiwan, only “only” or “only” is used.

When you see a quantifier that seems to be omitted, it is not easy to distinguish whether it is a Chinese term. This requires a considerable sense of Taiwanese traditional Chinese usage before the invasion of Chinese terms. The reason for this is precisely because the difference in the use of quantifiers between the two sides is only situational, and it is rare that the situation can be simply divided into “Taiwan will use this word and the other side will use that word.” Therefore, although strictly speaking it is not probabilistic, the author can only classify it as a Chinese term in Category D.

Thursday, January 11, 2024 | Feedback

Today I saw a car magazine using the phrase “car owners’ feedback” on social media, so today let’s talk about the Chinese term “feedback.”

The Chinese term “feedback” and the Taiwanese version of “feedback” are actually translated from the same English word “feedback”.

The author studied in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in college, so I had the opportunity to be exposed to many concepts related to feedback in courses related to automatic control. In terms of automatic control, feedback refers to this situation: Imagine a car and we want to control it to maintain a speed of 60 kilometers per hour. When the speed of the car drops below 60 kilometers due to external reasons, a signal will be transmitted back to the computer from the speed measuring device, allowing the computer to decide to increase the accelerator. This returned signal (the accelerator controls the speed, so from the accelerator to the vehicle speed is The “outbound” signal, which sends the speed back to the computer is the “return” signal) is called feedback.

Similarly, under certain circumstances, a signal will be forwarded to the mechanical transmission point further downstream. This situation is called feedforward (a possible situation is that, for example, the driver presses the accelerator hard, and the computer will send the signal to the automatic transmission Make it downshift. The transmission is further behind the engine in the transmission of power, so it is feedforward).

Engineers in Taiwan always give people the image of speaking in English and “engineer language”. People always think that they will say sentences like this: “Has your backend done the compile action?”. In fact, although we will also avoid “doing OO actions”, judging from the situation when the author was studying in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, we do tend to use proper nouns directly in the original text.

This leads to the fact that feedback and feedback in Taiwanese usage are rarely used, but are often used directly in English. Therefore, when feedback is used in a less professional situation (for example, it is used for feedback rather than automatic control feedback), everyone will It is easy to only hear the Chinese usage and not the Taiwanese usage (there is a well-known problem in the professional fields on the other side, especially the engineering field, that they cannot understand it unless it is translated into Chinese). And this naturally led to the prosperity of Chinese terminology.

Today we introduced “feedback”, which belongs to Category B Chinese terms.

Friday, January 12, 2024 | Fireworks, Fireworks and Fireworks

I happened to see someone write “fireworks (fireworks)” today, as if they were discussing the New Year’s Eve fireworks a while ago, so let’s choose today to talk about this word.

The author has only seen “fireworks” since he was a child. It wasn’t until he grew up that he saw the translation from the other side of the country and learned that “fireworks” is also used (before that, there was only “Fireworks descending Yangzhou in March”, and this fireworks has nothing to do with fireworks) . Later, around 2020, I started to see people (and so far only Taiwanese) start using “fireworks” to refer to “fireworks”.

Judging from the author’s experience as a translator, “fireworks” is the usage in Taiwan and “fireworks” is the usage in China. There should be no problem, but “fireworks” is difficult to determine. Based on the author’s current observation, it seems that this is a usage further derived from the invasion of Chinese terms? But why? During the year of writing this book, we should still have the opportunity to encounter many new words created “for the purpose of modifying Chinese terminology” (such as picture capture, screen update rate), but this “fireworks” the author really wants to Doesn’t make sense.

Another possibility is that “fireworks” has nothing to do with the Chinese term. It is simply because people don’t want to see smoke when watching fireworks (every year during the 101 New Year’s Eve fireworks, some people complain that the smoke is too big and they can’t see the beautiful fireworks), so it was changed. Became fireworks. Because what you want to see when watching fireworks is the flames, not the smoke. This is just like how many female operators of stores (especially in the catering industry) have begun to call themselves “bosses” in recent years, removing the word “老” from “proprietress”.

As a language worker, I still need to accumulate more experience with a word before identifying it as a Chinese term. As for this “fireworks”, the author is really not sure.

The purpose of writing this series of articles is not only to highlight the Chinese terms that the author sees every day, but also to arouse more people to think and discuss who is and who is not a Chinese term. Therefore, if there are readers, especially professionals who are also writers, who have a more certain answer, the author is also welcome to see someone explain it. Only in this way can it be regarded as a successful introduction, so that the study of China’s Simplified Chinese invasion of Taiwan’s Traditional Chinese can become a A true science.

Today we briefly discussed fireworks, “pyrotechnics” and “pyrotechnics”. There is no problem if the fireworks are in Taiwan Traditional Chinese, and there is no problem if the fireworks are in Simplified Chinese (Category B Chinese terms), but “fireworks” really need to be observed.

Saturday, January 13, 2024｜Follow

Today is the general election, so it is not surprising that the United Daily News has this headline: ““The whole world is paying attention”!Taiwan election on BBC, NHK homepage」。

In fact, even if it were not for this news report, the word “concern” has been used more and more frequently in the past 10 years. From being used by news media to express the degree of attention an issue has received to being used to translate “follow” on social media, this Chinese term has invaded Taiwan in a wide range of situations.

When I was a child, I once listened to the 1989 “Who Will Say Crosstalk This Night”. In the joke “Bullshit Training”, the current word “concern” is used like this:

“It’s like a minister who came out of the ministry and reporters gathered around to visit him. He said, ‘Minister, minister, the whole country is concerned about this issue. Please express your opinion immediately!'”

At this time, he used “concern”, but the media in the 2020s should use “concern.” By the way, the most common usage I heard when I was a child was “concern”, but this word later took on a negative connotation, and now it sounds like “concern” in the sense that someone is asking a legislator to “choose” something (facts There is a special word for this action called “Guan Shuo”, but in the same way, later, when people were talking about Guan Shuo, it was almost like taking the person to court for a level of accusation, so Guan Shuo became concern, and concern became concern. focus on).

Perhaps it is precisely this process of being tainted with negative meanings that allows the word “concern” to take advantage of the opportunity.

In addition to representing “concern, concern”, “concern” also has a completely different usage, just like the “report” we talked about earlier, which is very consistent with the Chinese language practice of merging different meanings into the same word. In social media, we can set the software to send the updated status of a specific person to our own interface. This action is called “follow”. It is called “follow” in Taiwanese Traditional Chinese. Some social media also directly translate it as “follow”. ; In Chinese Simplified Chinese, this is also called “attention”.

Of course, some people will have a question: If you want to change “attention”, what about “attention”? First of all, “attention” itself is a man-made word, and it has quite a lot of misused suffixes such as “importance” and “seriousness” in “From the West Without Transformation to the West with Transformation” written by Mr. Yu Guangzhong in 1987. To create new words.

Therefore, in fact, the use of this word should not be encouraged at all, but should be rewritten in its original usage. For example, “This is a high-profile case” can be changed to “This case has attracted public attention” and other suffixes are not used unless the suffix is abused. to the usage of Chinese terms.

Today we discussed “concern”, which is a Category B Chinese term, and it is a case where the intrusion is serious and it is no longer easy to correct.

Sunday, January 14, 2024 | High Difficulty and Hard Difficulty

I happened to see someone say “it’s not that difficult” on the Internet today, so let’s talk about a relatively informal Chinese expression today.

When I was studying translation, I learned that there is a concept called “collocation (we do not use any Chinese translation for this word, we use it directly in English)”. This concept refers to what kind of adjectives should be paired with what kind of things.

For example, we use “tall” and “short” to describe a person’s height, but “high” and “low” are used to describe the height of a mountain; “long” and “short” are used to describe the body length of non-upright animals. , distance is represented by “far” and “near”. From the perspective of weights and measures, these things are all considered “length”, but we will use different adjectives according to the situation. This is collocation.

Some collocations are simple, but others are much more complex. For example, we have all heard of “high-risk industries”, but if “risk” is made into a sentence, we can also say “the risk of doing this industry is relatively high.”

But no matter what, China’s Simplified Chinese has a tendency to simplify collocation. For example, we say age as “high” and “low”, but in Chinese terms we can often see “older”, which does not conform to Taiwan’s traditional Chinese grammar. The usage; height should be “high” and “low”, but the author has also seen the usage of “large height” in a game produced in China (the mobile game “Girls’ Frontline”). It seems that regardless of height, depth, time (age), weight (especially the word load), almost all can be described as “big” and “small” in Chinese usage.

This is somewhat similar to the reduction or even disappearance of quantifiers mentioned a few days ago. They are changes that are in line with the highest guiding principle of “simplification” in Simplified Chinese. Therefore, the author will classify it as a Category B Chinese term, although there are a few usages that are common to those in Taiwan and only differ in quantity.

Navigating the Maze of Translating Military Aviation Manufacturers’ Names: A Look at Foreign Transliteration