I suppose the moral of the story is don't judge a book by its title?

I spent the months of March, April, May wrestling with a book that will be my horror until the end of time.

Consumer.ology by Philip Graves.

I think I was fooled by its funky title when I agreed to translate it. (I was also fooled by the purple prose. I think when I read it before I accepted it, I was reading it on autopilot mode, so the book superficially appeared to be interesting.) I regretted it for a whole three months.

The book on the surface was supposed to be about consumer behaviour, which to be honest wasn't a subject that came to me easily when I did it at university. I actually got a decent mark in it but it was hard. But I thought I'd at least have some background on it and would be able to do it, though it might be a little harder than Brand New World.

Oh boy, I was wrong. The basic gist of the book is: market research is popular, but it doesn't work, because people don't know what they want and they say one thing but want something else. Sounded simple enough, except that the book was laced with about 80% pure, academic psychology, which, let's just say, I don't have enough background to even understand in English. But that actually wasn't the problem.

The problem was that this book just read like a very, very long piece of discouragement. The author went on and on and on about how market research is faulty, lists reasons a, b, c about why market research is terrible, based on these x, y, z theories of psychology, but doesn't tell you what the alternative to it is. It was extremely repetitive, like someone took a hammer and was beating the message into my head. There came a point in the book where I literally banged my head down on the keyboard and wanted to scream, "Fine, I get it, market research sucks! Now tell me what to do differently!"

And I've finished the book, but I still don't know what the alternative is.

Actually, no, I do. The author says that instead of asking people (market research) what they want, you should see (observe) what people do and base your market decisions on that. Except that when he finally got to this alternative method, it was like he ran out of steam, having spent 200 pages talking about how faulty the talking method is. So he sort of waffles through a couple of examples of the observation method and say that this is the best method.

Except I have a feeling the author rather misses the point of the whole concept of market research in the first place. He defines market research (very narrowly) as going around talking to people and having people telling you what they want. Then he spends the whole book shooting it down, saying this is horrible. Yet his alternative is just another aspect of market research. I thought the idea was rather obvious. Of course you can't base your decisions on what people say alone, you have to observe what they do.

I don't think any undergrad student who took MARK2012 (Marketing Research) at my university really thought that the company we did our research project for should definitely sell rainbow lollies because a bunch of UNSW students who came to our focus groups say so. Even applied to real life, isn't it rather obvious that yes, people do change their mind, and yes, if people are in a focus group being filmed, they're going to act not themselves, so you shouldn't take everything they say at face value? (That's his entire argument against market research, basically.)

So I guess in the end, I just don't know what the point of the book was. It was rather like proving the obvious, yet in a very long-winded, discouraging, repetitive manner.

It didn't help the translation process that I wasn't convinced by many of the author's arguments in the first place, and his writing style was...weird. It was like reading an academic piece of Conrad (I can't stand Joseph Conrad's writing style.) My editor wasn't too fond of this book either so I'm not sure what state it will be in when it finally hit the printers. I have a feeling it'll be a lot shorter.

PS: I have absolutely no idea why my ISP has decided to block the domain blogspot.com. I have to use a proxy to actually view blogspot. How fun.

What’s in a name?

…Well, a lot, apparently. Juliet had no idea what she was talking about.

Along with globalisation, there comes a rather long-winded debate in Vietnam that I just find slightly silly and a bit like arguing that an apple is a fruit and an orange is a fruit but an apple is not an orange (that’s not really a saying, I made that up :P).

So, should Vietnamese (or Chinese or Thai or X nationality, for that matter) people take on English names when living overseas/working with foreigners/not working with foreigners and not living overseas/ever?

I’ve been called Hen or something that rhymes with Heinz ketchup. And regardless of famous English rule of “i before e except after c”, I’ve lost count of the number of time people have spelled my name Hein. Trust me, I know it’s annoying when people mispronounce/misspell your name. But maybe my name is still a relatively easy name to write and pronounce, I don’t see the fuss adopting or not adopting an English name. But other people apparently do put up a fuss.

There are two arguments to this debate:

• Yes, when you live overseas and your name can be mispronounced into something rude/unpleasant then by all means, go by some other name. 
• No, even if you’re threatened with death you still should not change anything about the name that your parents gave you because you should have pride/be patriotic/not do it just because having an English name is cool

And then there’s the stance of “Who cares? No one makes a fuss over foreigners adopting Vietnamese names, we even find it interesting/intriguing. Why do we discriminate against Vietnamese people who adopting foreign names?”

You know what, all three points are valid, and yet there are people who just don’t get that!

As I understand it, one of the things that stirred up this debate is a fad amongst Vietnamese Paris Hilton-like celebrities who are famous for being famous who all have English names regardless of there being no need for it. They live in Vietnam, they “work” (whatever that work is) in Vietnam with Vietnamese people, so why? Indeed.  And this, I must say, is a case when it’s really stupid to adopt English names because it doesn’t stem from consideration and respect for others or for yourself, it’s a fad that is …well, pointless. 

A friend of mine worked in a company (in Vietnam!) where it is compulsory for you to have an English name. I think this is ridiculous because 1) even if the company is foreign, they have a base in Vietnam, so deal with it! When in Rome... and 2) it's forcing one culture on another. I'm not going to compare it to the Chinese Qing-dynasty queue order because it's a rather slippery slope, but it is nonetheless, not very respectful of the home culture.

Personally, I think that even if you live overseas, but you have a relatively innocent name like mine, you shouldn’t feel the need or pressure to adopt another English name. I think if foreign people are capable of pronouncing your name in your native tongue and it doesn’t get mangled into something too unpleasant, then they should be given a chance to show you respect by calling you by your birth name. But that’s just my opinion. In this case, if you do adopt your name, it should be considered a personal choice and because you live overseas, an English name just makes your day to day life a little more convenient.

And then there are cases of Vietnamese names when written in English (or French for that matter), just looks rude. My Dung is a Vietnamese name with Chinese roots (美容) that means beautiful countenance but it looks rather problematic on an English-language document.  And then I pity the man whose name is Le Chien who lives in France. Spelling aside, there names like Phuc or Bich that are just bad when you pronounce it wrong. These are cases when I would say, yes, for the purity of both our languages, please adopt an English name if you live overseas or interact with foreigners on a regular basis.  In these cases, it’s not a matter of pride or coolness or patriotism, it’s more a matter of being considerate of both the person who might have to say your name and of yourself, who will otherwise hear very unpleasant things when you are being called.

Not all Vietnamese names get mangled into unpleasant things though. At my office there is a girl named Quynh Anh and it gets mispronounced into Queen Anne which is rather interesting.

As to the case of expats living in Vietnam having Vietnamese names. This is the double standard. Vietnamese find foreigners who have Vietnamese names rather an exciting phenomenon. It’s a case of OMG, Western people actually wants to copy something of ours!!!

This is, I think, slightly different from Vietnamese people taking English names when they live overseas, which is all too usual, so much that sometimes it is considered the norm. Expats living in Vietnam taking Vietnamese names is a lot more unusual and it’s usually a gesture of friendship, it usually happens with expats who actually speak Vietnamese (which is not as usual as you might think) and yes, it does make people friendlier to you in certain circumstances.  

Case in point: I knew a family, whose children went to my school and everyone in their family had a Vietnamese name. Part of that was due to the fact that they’d been living in Vietnam since the time when we still see foreigners on the street and point at them yelling “Tây! Tây!” Now, it’s not so unusual to see expats living and working in Vietnam so that doesn’t happen (as often) anymore, at least in the city. Another reason, I’d hazard a guess, was that at the time when they first came to Vietnam, people were not so used to trying to figure out how to pronounce “complicated” foreign names. But maybe the most important point is, their Vietnamese names didn’t replace their real names. It was more like a nickname and most of the time they were still addressed by their real names.

I don’t think you’ve committed any kind of crime if you want an English name, but I think there should be a reason for it, even if it’s just convenience. This is such a relative issue that you can’t possibly say “you have to do this” or “you can’t do this”, which some people are trying to do.

I'm going to be published!

Well, not really me, per se.

So last year, a friend introduced me to a book editor at a publishing house in Ho Chi Minh City and the editor asked me to translate a book for them from English to Vietnamese. The book? Brand New World by Max Lenderman.

Whilst it is a very very interesting book about marketing in BRIC countries, this post is more to talk about the art of translation in general.

I have just received the final edit of the translated book and it's due to be published at the end of this month. Let me tell you, there's something about seeing your name on a book, even as just the translator, that is just...I can't describe it. I was literally jumping up and down. Thankfully I took the day off and wasn't at work because I wouldn't be able to concentrate on work after receiving that. (My taking two days off work had nothing to do with the book).

Of course I knew that it was going to be published sooner or later (they paid me, after all) and that I translated it, but it wasn't until you see the actual page, with the book's name and your name on the same page, that it really starts to sink it. I can't wait to have the actual book in my hand though.

Frontispiece

Anyway, I'm looking at the pdf of this book. It's 328 pages in full, with cover pages and end notes which I did not translate, but for this book I did translate about 280 pages, which now when I'm looking at all of it one place, I'm sort of in disbelief. I'm even more in disbelief reading back at it, because I don't remember writing any of these words but nonetheless, the words are here on the page. The unfamiliarness wasn't due to the edits, most of it was actually my words when I compared to my manuscript. I swear I'm reading it, and the first chapter sounds familiar but that's because I agonised so much over it but then as I go on, I start reading it as if a book someone else had written and translated, that I was reading this for the first time. Which is weird because at the back of my mind I knew I translated it but it doesn't feel like it. I think it's partly because the actual original words and the ideas behind the words weren't mine to begin with, so it doesn't feel I'm reading myself.

The only problem with actually having translated a book is that for a while you go a bit funny and read everything with the intent to translate it. I was reading a translation of Eat, Pray, Love and I kept translating it back into English from Vietnamese. But that's partly because the translation wasn't that great to begin with and it distracted me (I don't mean I am by any means a perfect translator, but this particular translation of Eat, Pray, Love wasn't to my style. Then again maybe that's just the original book itself). Then I watched the movie and was bored and so right now it doesn't look like I'm going to be finishing the book.

Back to translation. Now that I look back at it, my whole "career" in translation is rather scary, mostly because I'm totally making things up as I go and I'm not remotely qualified to do it; I still feel like I have no business translating a book that is going to actually be published. The most obvious reason for that is that my Vietnamese isn't even that good to begin with. I went to Vietnamese school for exactly 3 years of my life and the rest of it was spent in English-speaking schools and university with very limited expose to learning Vietnamese as a language. My grasp of vocabulary is woefully limited and when it comes to marketing lingo? I swear I looked up every single marketing term on the internet for the Vietnamese translation. And yet it was because I had so lost touch with Vietnamese in my education that prompted me to get into translation in the first place.

It started when in my first year of university in Australia, having too much time on my hand and in an environment with too little opportunity to use Vietnamese and I was afraid that after three years here, my Vietnamese would be even worst than it already it. At the time, for reasons now unknown to me, I was member of an online forum about movies and they were starting a group who would translate movie news from English into Vietnamese. I joined. I totally didn't intend to stay there for the whole three years of university. The circumstances in which I left the group and the forum wasn't the most...cordial, shall we say, but looking back, I can't help but be grateful for that time because as useless as it sounded, spending all that time online, I learned so much and met some people who are now really close friends (including said friend who introduced me to said book editor who offered me said book :P). So yes, I went to translating gossip news about Lindsay Lohan's DUI cases to translating a book, but hey, you had to start somewhere, right?

“Phuong” was hard enough, how the heck is a foreigner supposed to pronounce “Fwong”?

In Vietnamese, there is a colloquial (and rather slangy and offensive) saying, “ngu rồi còn tỏ ra nguy hiểm”, which literally means someone who is stupid but pretending to be dangerous. It refers to somebody who talks about a matter that he absolutely does not understand in a way that is supposed to show off his knowledge on the subject but in reality just shows how ignorant he is. I have rarely seen anything that deserves that above title more than this article (it’s in Vietnamese).

This was originally published on Dan Tri, a web portal positioned towards increasing education in the population. Ironically, this is a portal that frequently publishes articles with grammatical errors, so I wasn’t too surprised that it actually published something so incredibly…stupid. But that’s another story. This above article just gets on my nerves because it shows how the author doesn’t understand both the Vietnamese language and Latin-based languages.

                                                                                                         

The general point of the article was calling for a revision and revolution of the whole Vietnamese alphabet and spelling system because the current system is “too complicated for nothing”.

The author claims that the current Vietnamese alphabet with letters that do not exist in the English alphabet (for example, đ, ư) makes it harder for Vietnam to integrate with the world. Yeah, say that to the Chinese and the Russian.

He also claims that the Vietnamese language is “wasting” letters F, J, W, and Z by using “PH”, “GI”, “Ư” and “D” respectively to represent sounds created by the former letters. He also claims that we are messing up “D”, which is normally pronounced “Z” in (standard) Vietnamese (“French/English D” is actually written as “Đ” in Vietnamese) while as a mathematical notation, “D” is still pronounced the “French way”.  Ok, so I will give him that it can be baffling to understand why the rest of the world pronounce D one way and we Vietnamese pronounce it in a completely different way and invent another letter to represent the sound the rest of the world uses for D.  However, just because it doesn't necessarily conform to the rest of the world, does it mean we have to change it? Where’s the cultural distinction in language then? Why don’t we just turn around and speak and write English if we want to pronounce it their way? (For the record, the French pronounces “I” as “ee” which is the letter “E” in English, so who’s wrong? Hehe.)

He also claims the lack of F, J, W, Z in Vietnamese can make it confusing for students learning maths and natural sciences which do use these letters. So? How is that different from learning to write squiggly Greek sigma, omega, mu, nu, which are, in fact, even harder to write properly than F, J, W, Z (theta, not so much)? Should the rest of the world incorporate these Greek letters into their alphabets now to cater to the maths language?

What gets on my nerves most is his suggestion that we replace Ư with W. Why? Because in Vietnamese there is one case where we use W to represent the Vietnamese letter Ư in an abbreviation. One. Oh and because on the Vietkey typing system, you hit the letter W on your keyboard when you want to type Ư.

Erm…dude? W is a consonant. Ư is a vowel. Just think on that for a minute.

If according to his “conversion”, then Phương, a very very common name in Vietnamese, would now be written Fwong. This is hilariously ironic.

Phuong is a very difficult Vietnamese name for many foreigners to pronounce. I have rarely, if ever, heard a foreigner pronounce it right on the first go. They usually pronounce it…wait for it… Fwong. Which is WRONG! That’s not how you pronounce it! I can’t write down phonetically how that name is pronounced, but the English pronunciation of Fwong is absolutely and 100% wrong. And here, this guy is suggesting that we change the spelling of that name to Fwong. Surely, let’s do that and then start to wonder why no one ever pronounces our name right.

I won’t go into how impossible it would be to place Vietnamese accent marks on a W.

The author of the article also has a vendetta against the letter combinations “GH”, which in Vietnamese is pronounced the same way as “G” and “NGH” which is pronounced the same way as “NG”. The use of these “silent H” combinations depends on some very simple grammar rules that you learn in about…grade 2, if not younger (I learnt it and I only went to Vietnamese school until grade 3). The author proposes we eliminate the “GH” and “NGH” combinations. I may consider the idea properly if he actually had a decent reason for this proposal. Instead, his reason is “so we don’t have to confuse for no reason over whether to write “ngành ngề” or “nghành nghề” or “nghành ngề” or “ngành nghề” .

FYI, it’s “ngành nghề” (career).

Basically, his reason is that it requires him to think and so it’s not worth it. Yeah. Just announce to the world that you can’t grasp basic, primary school grammar, why don’t you.

His conclusion is we don’t need to make our language “complicated in a stupid way”. The way this guy writes this, he apparently thinks other languages is written so simply and exactly as it sounds. He fails to realise that Vietnamese is one of the least complicated languages in terms of spelling and grammar. Once you grasp the rules of spelling, you can pretty much spell almost anything. By the time you are in grade 3, you should be able to spell perfectly, even if you have no idea what you’re spelling means. There are no such thing as “spelling bees” in Vietnamese because the sound you produce when you speak is exactly what you put down on the page. Spelling, in Vietnamese, in a concept for very young primary school students. In fact, Vietnamese, with all its “redudant” letters, is a language where if you know how to pronounce a word, you will 99% of the time spell it correctly (or at least you will spell it as you speak it, so if you mispronounce, you will also misspell). Unlike English. Colour, anyone?

The thing is, Vietnamese teenagers today need no help from this guy in corrupting our language.  The Vietnamese brand of textspeak already contorts the written language so that it almost becomes a code, already doing what this guy suggests and eliminating the “GH” and “NGH” and replacing letters with “F” etc. The result is that eventually they will carry those textspeak habits over to their academic writing, and heaven forbid, one day, my friends will be called “Fuong” instead of “Phuong”. Kind of like how “thru” is making its way to be a legit word in the English language.