Read something a long time ago about what takes to be a good translator, that the virtues are summarized as patience, humility and determination. For humility one shall always remind him/herself that it is not the translator who is writing or rewriting whatever is being translated, and by determination one shall derive pleasure from wanting to convey the work in perfection. As to patience, my original understanding is that one shall make commitment with time and energy, to sit in front of the computer being buried in piles of dictionaries, now after several hours spent in translating Cen Shen’s Song of White Snow, I realized that it is almost impossible to not be effected by the frustration of unsolved, when there is just no equivalent word in the other language.
Just finished reading the oral autobiography of Zhou Youguang, the 104 years old Chinese linguist. At the end he said, “原来，人生就是一朵浪花”. “At last, life is a spindrift’? “At last, life is the white water on the wave?” 浪 in Chinese is wave, or as the definition given by Oxford Thesaurus of English, a long body of water curling into an arched form and breaking on the shore, and 浪花 literally the wave flower, is the white spray blown from the crests of waves by the wind. By comparing life with the “wave flower”, the wise old man expresses his view of an individual life as ephemeral and trivial in the vast ocean of history and civilization, but cheerful and lively as the same time, as the Chinese view of 浪花 as a metaphor. What is the correct English word here?
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