The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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12 The Linguist Vol/57 No/1 2018 www.ciol.org.uk FEATURES This is not an instance of careless translation, but one of localisation. It so happens that in colloquial Cantonese, the predominant dialect used in Hong Kong, the number 7 has a pejorative connotation. To describe someone's appearance as 'seven' means they look old-fashioned, clumsy or generally unpleasant, and this usage is deeply rooted in local parole. Therefore a literal translation will most certainly be interpreted by a local Hongkonger as 'This is old-fashioned' or 'This is clumsy' – not the kind of association that iPhone 7 is supposed to invoke! Solving riddles Linguistic manoeuvres are especially crucial in the negotiation of humour across cultures. In an advertisement for iOS stickers, the US, HK (pictured), MC and TW versions present interesting divergences: Each image is a screenshot of a messaging app with a riddle text on it. The English original reads: 'Why can't a nose be 12 inches long?… Because then it'll be a foot'. None of the Chinese versions is a direct translation because, in Chinese, the word for 'foot' (unit of measurement) creates no pun with 'foot' (body part), so the wordplay would be lost. What is more remarkable is that each of the three Chinese versions develops its own unique riddle, tapping into a linguistic point that resonates within its respective audience. The MC version reads 请问世上有那种鸭, 是 要穿袜子的?… 腳丫 ('What kind of duck needs to wear socks?… Feet'). Here we are playing with the homophone 'ya' in the words for 'feet' (腳丫; jiaoya) and 'duck' (鴨; ya). The HK version is an entirely different joke in the local dialect: 點解火腿同香腸一齊喺鑊 裡面, 但唔傾計呢?… 因為仲未熟 ('Why is it that ham and sausage are in the same pan but don't talk to each other?… Because they're not cooked/close yet'). This plays with the homonym 熟 (suk), which can mean 'cooked' (as in food) or 'close' (as in between friends). The TW version uses a local food item 檳榔 (binlang; 'betel nut') and homophonises it into the pseudo-compound 冰狼 (bing-lang; 'ice-wolf'): 有隻狼來到北極, 不小心掉到冰海, 被撈起來時變成什麼?… 檳榔 ('A wolf travels to the North Pole and falls into the icy ocean. What does it become?… 'Betel nut/ice-wolf'). Interestingly, even with my translational expositions, the English reader would not find the Chinese versions humorous due to their linguistic- and culture-specificity. The point of this advertisement is more about the stickers than the content of the messages, yet the text is still subject to careful crosscultural treatment, which suggests that in localisation, texts are seen as gestalts – i.e. holistic visual-discursive objects. Orthographic and visual manipulations further demonstrate the intricate semiotic processes at work. Each of the Chinese versions uses a different script: the simplified script for MC, the vernacular Cantonese script for HK, and the traditional script for TW. The user profile has changed: 'Brian' is 'translated' into a Chinese name and face (the same one for HK and TW; a different one for MC). This 'translation' of Western identities into Asian ones for the Greater Chinese market is not uncommon in Apple's advertising campaigns. Visual cues What this kind of transposition demonstrates is that localisation can involve a thorough resemiotisation (the reconfiguration of signs), in which visuality is a salient factor. The most illustrative example of such translation in marketing communication can be found in the advertisement 'Switching to iOS from Android is easy'. In the US and MC versions, the featured app icons are quite different, as apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are not relevant in mainland China. The screen on the MC version features instead popular apps in the region, such as the shopping apps 天猫 (Tianmao) and 淘宝 (Taobao), lifestyle app 大众点评 (Dazhong dianping), game app 开心消消乐 (Kaixin xiao xiao le), Q&A app 知乎 (Zhihu) and messaging app 微信 (Weixin). As marketing discourse is multimodal, such re-visualisation should be viewed within the broader notion of translation-as-communication, alongside more conventional modes of semiotic transfer, such as interlingual translation. Successful localisation involves strategic manipulation of apparently minute details via both textual translation and semiotic reworking. The advertisement 'Nobody understands you quite like Siri' consists of an image with two overlapping screens. The screen on the right shows how one uses Siri to recall an earlier message: 'When is Karla's recital? Was she supposed to practise first?', sent to a certain John Bailey. The three Chinese translations retain basically the same question but the names Karla and John Bailey are converted into common Chinese names. There is also intralingual translation, where the same question is crafted in slightly different forms: the HK version uses Cantonese, as usual, with its idiosyncratic lexis and dialectal script; and while the MC and TW versions are very similar, they use different lexical choices, which presumably represent idiomatic usage in the respective linguistic communities. What is more interesting is the left screen. The English original features Lyft (a transportation company based in San Francisco), a snapshot of the direction map and a Siri message that reads: 'Lyft can be