“At the age of 10, Chang's mother renamed her Ailing, a transliteration of Eileen, in preparation for her entrance into an English school.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Chang
Sorry, still no.
You’re not who you say you are. You are who others say you are. If you write your entire corpus of merit in Chinese, your “Englishicized” name is not the name of record. At least not in this era anymore. There is an eternal tradition of using the names of writers and others of merit in the name of their own language. Only in a few selected cases do we find this kind of nonsense.
It was and is still very important to many to have the moniker of a “western name.” That’s fine. You can have it. You can use it for yourself. You can even force your family and friends to use it. You can even try to force strangers to use it as well. But you’re certainly not Eileen. And even if you are Eileen, your work certainly wasn’t written by someone named Eileen. And when we’re preparing something for translation, we’re looking at the name of the author of the work, not the little emblem you have close to your heart which has nothing to do with your work, but rather some sociological and psychological or silly issues you or your mother needed to work out.
Names emerge from group inclusion. If your work doesn’t belong to that same group, your name doesn’t apply to that work either. Especially when that work specifically belongs to and is written exclusively to and for another group for which you already have an existing name that applies.
It would seem easy to blame the missionaries here. Check. And Hong Kong. No, because the blame in that case really falls to the British. But the real issue here is from shitty publishing entities exoticizing and otherizing things because they were racist that way. But their crappiness is certainly added to by their own ignorance and pushback by their source material creators who viewed cross-cultural activities through their own lens, disregarding the customs of cultural transfer of the target culture. If someone tells you their name is Eileen and asks you translate their name that way you politely decline. Yes, that is English, but it is English in the context of a different culture. Cross-cultural English to English translation is nothing new. But in this case it’s even worse than that. Leaving trousers untranslated is nothing compared to this. We’re not even pretending that Eileen was a name that meant anything to her in the context of the Chinese society and work. It was an entirely independent thing. To attach it to her writing translated into English would be to miss the point entirely.
Ken Oe walking around in New York forcing all his English-speaking friends to call him Ken while writing his material in Japanese for a Japanese audience who knows him exclusively by Kenzaburo does not get to dictate that his translated material will be listed as written by “Ken Oe.” Think about it. Even if we would have put up with shit like that 50 or 100 years ago or a while ago doesn’t mean we should stand for it for a second.
Al Huxley.
Fred Nietzsche
Pete Dostoevsky
Group membership. Think about it. It applies to work and to people. People, despite clever sayings to the contrary, are not their work. People are people. Work is work. I’m not saying that people or work can’t have multiple existences and identities, (in fact translation is about creating such an existence/identity) but that this not necessarily be true in every case. And before deciding such membership exists careful consideration must be undertaken.
And we go back and change things that are crap. The Mao Tse-tung era is over for many, many good reasons.
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"I self-identify as African American - that's how I'm treated and that's how I'm viewed.” – Barack Obama, 2009
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