[It was difficult at the beginning because Zhang needed to learn about American politics, American history, American personalities and American idioms. He is clearly a quick study. He drops Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media director, into conversation and riffs on Republican Ron DeSantis’s win in the Florida gubernatorial race.]
By
Anna Fifield
Zhang Jiaqian spends several hours a day trying to render the
American president’s
tweets into Chinese. (Anna Fifield/The Washington Post)
|
TIANJIN,
China — If President Trump’s tweets are sometimes
puzzling in English, just imagine trying to translate his idiosyncratic prose
into Chinese.
Total hoax, lap dogs, Mr. Magoo, horse face,
smocking gun, presidential harassment, angry Dems, steel slat barrier, total
sham, Scott Free, fake news, covfefe. Much of it defies the laws of semantics
and grammar, making translation a challenge.
But that is Zhang Jiaqian’s mission. Every
day, he spends several hours trying to render the American president’s tweets
into Chinese, and writes a commentary far longer than 280 characters to explain
them.
“I think this is a public service to Chinese
people. Chinese people need to understand him,” Zhang said during a break from
his day job at a medical device company in Tianjin, southeast of Beijing. He
asked not to disclose the name of the company, fearing his employer would not
look kindly on his extracurricular activity.
“If we want to win the trade war, if China is
going to make the right policies, we need to understand Trump,” he continued in
passable English he taught himself. “He may be reelected in 2020, so we may
have to cope with him for a long time.”
Zhang began a page on WeChat, a Chinese
social media app, in April when the trade battle was beginning. He thought it
would be a good way to inform Chinese people what Trump was saying through his
tweets.
It was difficult at the beginning because
Zhang needed to learn about American politics, American history, American
personalities and American idioms. He is clearly a quick study. He drops Dan
Scavino, Trump’s social media director, into conversation and riffs on
Republican Ron DeSantis’s win in the Florida gubernatorial race.
But he found that he couldn’t just translate
Trump’s tweets. He also had to provide context. “If I just translated his
Twitter, no one would understand it.”
What Trump conveys in a word takes Zhang
whole sentences to contextualize. He had to introduce his followers to Stormy
Daniels. “Pocahontas” was particularly time-consuming. To explain why a
Kardashian was visiting the Oval Office, he had to first explain what a
Kardashian was.
And Trump’s pejorative nicknames lose much of
their zing in the translation.
“Cryin’ Chuck” Schumer becomes “Chuck the
Weeper” and “Crooked Hillary” is “Hillary the Liar.” James B. Comey, instead of
being a “total sleaze,” becomes “outright despicable.”
Then there’s the “manipulated and nauseating
political persecution” instead of Trump’s “Rigged and Disgusting Witch Hunt.”
The ubiquitous “Fake News” becomes the much less catchy “made-up news.”
This newspaper, however, gets something of an
upgrade, becoming the “Amazonian Washington Post,” while the New York Times is
not “failing” but merely “decaying.”
“Democrat spin machines” becomes “Democrat
lie generators” in Chinese.
“Pocahontas”: “The colluding Indian woman Bo
Ka Hong Ta Si.”
“America First”: “America takes precedence.”
“Elizabeth Warren beer catastrophe”:
“Elizabeth Warren’s acting was terrible in the beer video.”
Zhang’s most popular post was about Trump’s
complaint that it was too expensive to have a military parade in Washington, so
he would go to France to watch its parade. “Many people are critical of how
much money China spends on parades so they liked that the U.S. is being
frugal,” Zhang said.
China has a small but active online community
of Trump supporters who use the Chinese version of “libtards” — that’s the
“white left” — and champion the American president’s policies, even in these
trying days of U.S.-China relations.
But Zhang said he is not translating the
American president because he’s a supporter necessarily, but because he’s doing
a public service.
“Trump writes his foreign policy and his
domestic policy on Twitter,” Zhang said. “It is very important for Chinese to
know what he wants to do with the relationship between the U.S. and China. His
policies can affect China significantly.”
That said, however, there is one subject that
Zhang does not translate. The one that Chinese people would doubtless be most
interested in: China.
“When he criticizes China, it’s sensitive,”
Zhang said. “The Chinese government doesn’t like China being seen as the bad
guy. So I just don’t translate those tweets.”
He did not tell his followers that Trump
tweeted in December: “Did China ask us if it was okay to devalue their
currency” and “build a massive military complex?”
“I don’t think so!” Trump wrote.
Nor did Zhang try to translate the president’s
assertion that “I am a Tariff Man.”
He also didn’t attempt to explain that Trump
talked about last month’s truce in the trade war as a “BIG leap forward” — not
to be confused with the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous Communist Party policy
that led to crippling famine and tens of millions of deaths in the early 1960s.
On China’s highly censored Internet, these
kinds of discussions are fraught with difficulty. Individual posts can be
blocked, but so, too, can entire accounts.
Zhang tried to skirt these sensitivities. But
censors closed his first WeChat account, called “Trump’s Twitter Governance,”
in October. This was part of a crackdown that led the cyber administration to
block almost 10,000 social media accounts for violations such as “spreading
politically harmful information.”
Zhang set up a new account with a more subtle
name. It’s called “Kaopu English,” or “Trustworthy English,” as though it were
a language learning page. But “kaopu” can also be interpreted as “Things about
Trump.”
What’s more, Zhang refrains from calling the
American president by his official Chinese transliteration of “Te Lang Pu.” He
instead refers to Trump as “Chuan Pu,” with an intentional typo to further try
to avoid censorship.
He says he will continue trying to explain
the American president to his followers as long as he can keep his account
alive. There is no sign that Trump’s tweets will stop generating news and
requiring explanation anytime soon.
For all Zhang’s efforts, there is one
pronounced aspect of the president’s tweeting style that is definitely lost in
translation: his quirky use of capital letters. Chinese doesn’t have uppercase
and lowercase letters.
Lyric Li contributed to this report.
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