Showing posts with label Chinese words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chinese words. Show all posts

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Cultural Fascism and White Vocabulary Policies in Major US publications

"The west cultivates the dangerous notion that “knowledge only exists if it’s the West that knows it”. The consequences are far-reaching."
"Expats among themselves:Unfortunately, their journalists and editors, all Western educated, seem to have little knowledge and interest in the Chinese tradition (they couldn't tell your author what rujia or a shengren was); they jet in the country from one English-language conference to another (they don't speak Chinese), and are mostly looking out for English-speaking compatriots or Chinese ABCs in China to help them fill their pages. That the Chinese people for the last three thousand years have all kinds of jia, jiao, and xue (schools, practices, and teachings), and their own terms, categories, taxonomies, and archetypes of wisdom that the West might want to learn, understand, letting alone to know about seems to be beyond Science's mission to create a Chinese-free world of knowledge. As the historian Howard Zinn once remarked: "If something is omitted from history, people have no way of knowing that it is omitted." It is rather sad."
Read at Big Think: Cultural Fascism - Science Magazine: No shengren, please!

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

What's the Global Language?

Pattberg on Global Language and The End of Translation, Beijing 2013
What's the Global Language?
"The true 'global language' would be radically different from today's English (or any other major language); it would need to adopt the originality and the tens of thousands of words provided by humankind's other language traditions on top of it." -- T. Pattberg, The East-West Dichotomy (2013), Foreign Language Press, Beijing
I'm so excited to begin offering more public talks on 'Global language' and the 'End of translation' this winter 2013/2014, and I can't wait to expand the universe of Chinese (and other non-European) concepts and terminologies during my stay in Japan (and, hopefully, a brief excursion to the US).

Meanwhile, check out the new edition of The East-West Dichotomy (2013) available soon in book stores in China, university libraries, and in global online stores. I still have some free author copies, just send me an email at pattberg 'at' pku.edu.cn. Best!

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Somewhat Eccentric German Philologist Calls For New “Global Language” --Empower Lingua

For A More Colorful Global Language - The Color Run Beijing 2013

BEIJING - “A somewhat eccentric German philologist and research fellow at The Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University named Thorsten Pattberg, is calling for the construction of a new “global language”. This somewhat absurd declaration is mired in the rhetoric of cosmopolitan utopianism but is also enforced by an intriguing argument about Chinese translation.


Pattberg wrote an article for Chinese website English people daily in which he argued that much Chinese translation relies on the assumption that a suitable equivalent exists in the English language. The English language already has loads of loan words including jungle which comes from Hindi and alcohol which comes from Arabic, so he argues, why don’t we just incorporate the non-translatable Chinese words into English and make a “global language”. [READ AT EMPOWER LINGUA] [READ AT PEOPLE’S DAILY] [READ AT STRAITS TIMES] [GO TO EAST-WEST DICHOTOMY]

Friday, August 2, 2013

Add wushu, shengren, junzi and zhongguo meng to the global language!


DO NOT translate Chinese key terminologies!". This is true for kungfu, wushu, shengren, junzi, and... the zhongguo meng. Thorsten Pattberg, a disciple of Ji Xianlin, Gu Zhengkun, and Tu Weiming from Peking University explains why the correct names and the language of origin matter for inclusion into World History... a field that to this day is literally Chinese-free. [...] One day in June 2013; IAHS, Peking University.