"Genius translator" and "the most beautiful bookstore owner", the lament of the era of cultural elites

Junyu

An article about a "genius translator" suffering from bipolar disorder is being widely read. Many people are starting to pay attention to "translators are paid so little!" Nandu Observation's column "Why is the translation fee so low?" The book puts forward a point of view - improving the quality of translation is a very low economic marginal utility for publishing houses: the market demands for high-quality translations, the tolerance for low-quality translations is high, and high-quality translations do not bring corresponding benefits to publishers, so publishers will not pay high prices to seek better translations.

It's a lamentable thing that translators, as cultural elites, are not paid by the elite.

But that's the market.

The remuneration for translation is low, and there are many reasons that can be broken down:

According to the different contents, translation can be divided into several types: daily translation, business translation, academic translation, literary translation, each of which has a different market principle.

Daily translation: It is difficult for people to imagine that in the daily communication with foreigners, it is necessary to ask people who speak foreign languages to assist the two sides in the dialogue. When China first opened its doors in the 1980s, foreigners basically did not Chinese, Chinese people basically did not speak foreign languages, and daily non-commercial activities such as tourism, retail, and conversation required someone to live in and communicate.

This demand has faded as China's international status has changed – more and more foreigners are learning Chinese, and more and more Chinese people are mastering foreign languages (even of average level).

Business Translation: The demand for business translation arose in the 1990s when foreign companies entered the Chinese market on a large scale. After foreign companies enter, many business meetings, documents, including management communication, need to use foreign languages. At that time, learning foreign languages was very popular, because in the 80s you could "go abroad" and in the 90s you could "go to foreign companies to make a lot of money". Strictly speaking, in foreign companies, the status of translators comes from their ability to communicate between them, rather than the professional skills of the industry such as production, sales, and management. This type of decline lies in two factors:

First, with the popularity of foreign language education, most people, especially young people, can basically meet the needs of the daily operation of enterprises (although there are also old employees of foreign companies with English majors who complain: young people's foreign language emails and reports are not easy to read), coupled with scientific and technological progress, big data-based machine translation, at least can make people at both ends of different languages understand each other's meaning, then enterprises only need to retain industry professionals, do not need so many language translations. Of course, high-end business talks and formal documents still need to have accurate and fluent and standardized translations, but here it actually contains the added value of the language itself, good foreign language expression, implying "I am a high-end educated elite", just like the British say Oxford accent, is a kind of value transmission.

Second, due to the development of business and the change of China's status, more and more foreign enterprises have begun to learn Chinese, or at least respect the existence of Chinese. Before the 90s, when seeing foreigners, Chinese people would subconsciously say foreign languages to let each other understand themselves, if their foreign languages were not fluent, their pronunciation was not standard, and their grammar was wrong, they would be more or less ashamed - many Chinese people would refuse to speak foreign languages because of accent or grammar problems, thinking that they "could not speak foreign languages". Now it is more of a situation where both sides are on equal footing, and they may awkwardly speak each other's language, as long as they understand each other.

The two factors can be summed up, that is, the demand is reduced (not so many foreign language translations are needed), the supply is increased (more and more people can speak foreign languages), and the market price will naturally decline.

Academic translation: Academic translation is a classic example of "very low marginal effect". A person at the fourth or sixth level of college can use the help of a machine translation to "translate a large number of academic works into Chinese" in a month or two — really just "translating Chinese", and many translations are far from flowing smoothly, let alone understanding the author's academic views.

It sounds a bit bizarre, do not understand the author's academic views and the significance of the work, dare to translate?

But the truth is also very helpless: academic works are usually the painstaking efforts of the original author for several years or even decades of research, even professionals in the same field, to achieve a general understanding, it takes a long time and a very deep academic foundation. Ideally, of course, it would be best to translate by a professional who can understand the academic views of the original author and have excellent foreign language skills. But the number of such professionals is very small, and even if they do, they prefer to spend their time on their own academic research rather than translating other people's works, or from an economic point of view, the ideal translator opportunity cost is too high.

Another point. Then it lies in the translation of academic works, its academic value and translation value are mixed in the same commodity, can not be priced separately, that is, the so-called "buy books for the value of the original work", translation is good or not, but secondary. Therefore, inferior translations do not give the producer proper feedback, that is, the "allocation of resources at market prices" has failed to some extent.

One solution is to produce different translations of the same scholarly work, and different translations are priced according to the quality of the translation. However, one of the many contemporary academic works in the copyright period, the introduction can only be bought out by one publishing house, only one translation, and the second is that if it is a different translation of the same work, how many readers are willing to pay a premium for excellent translation, it is unknown - this can be seen from the different translations of some public books, excellent translations, may not sell well, this is still in the case of basically flat pricing.

Literary Translation: This is probably the category that is most accessible to the public and most demanding for translators. In the strictest sense, literature is actually untranslatable. In the words of the translation theorist Nida: Good translation should make readers of the target language feel the same as readers of the source language when reading. But in real life, even users of the same language, due to different ages, social classes, and living environments, have different understandings of the same expression - the Internet age is even more obvious, and many Internet terms are heavenly books for non-Internet natives. If ideography can barely reach the same level for functional reasons, purely linguistic aesthetic literature already has different feelings for users of the same language, let alone foreign language users.

In the early classical literary era, which won the novel plot and character shaping, translation could also let foreign language readers feel the twists and turns of the plot, the development of the story, and the image of the characters, but in the so-called "zero language" stage of Roland Bart, literature was more of a game of words, and this simple beauty and fun of words was very difficult to translate.

Another reason is the decline of serious literature in the mass market. In the 1980s, due to the concentrated outbreak of suppressed demand for many years, literary works were widely popular, and any literary work had extremely high sales (there are also various reasons here, such as the history we see now that the literary and artistic youth in the 80s who held the right to speak, more people did not appear in history; for example, in that era when there was no business and no art, people did not have many choices), and now, how many people read literary works?

How can such a declining market support high-quality professional translations with extremely high skill requirements?

Academic translation and literary translation are different from the first two in that they involve the unique situation of the Chinese publishing system, that is, only the official publishing house has a book number, or there is a publishing license to publish books, so this market is not a perfectly competitive market, the number of books that can be published is limited, and the publishing house has a considerable right to price.

Since the 1990s, this system with strong planned economic overtones has proved that it cannot produce quality books to meet market demand. With the development of the market economy, there have also been alternative methods such as cooperative publishing, which are planned and executed by market-oriented book studios, which to some extent introduce market competition, but due to the limited number of isbnbs, this is still not complete competition. On the one hand, the party with the resources (the publisher) is relatively strong, on the other hand, because resources such as isbiography are precious, the publishing house will attach great importance to input and output, and the author/translator must convince the publisher that their work can make money. This brings us back to the question we discussed earlier, how do translators prove themselves when the value of the translated work is mixed with the value of the original work?

Another factor is publication censorship, after the introduction of copyright can not get the ISBN, works / translation after completion of the case, but the case is not reviewed, as a rational economic person, publishing houses will naturally try to reduce variable copies such as translation fees to cope with the risk, but this topic is too extensive, is not the scope of this article.

It is a lamentable, but true, fact: translation, especially good translation, as representative of the cultural elite, is a declining profession whose practitioners are not paid commensurate with their education and the energy they have devoted.

Such an industry, which is considered "elite" and "valuable", but is declining with market changes, is not only translation, another typical example is the physical bookstore, however, unlike the fading translation, the bookstore has explored some innovations to survive, even if it is not what many readers think of as "real bookstores".

Many people believe that physical bookstores are the "spiritual homeland" and the home of "foreigners on the earth", but there are fewer and fewer physical bookstores, and a few live until now, usually carefully creating environmental spaces, selling coffee and cultural creation, so that some people complain, is this a "bookstore with a café", or a "café with a bookstore"?

In fact, the current bookstore is not profitable by the book itself, it is more in the sale of space and feelings, is a kind of virtual consumption.

Books are priced, and the gross income of bookstores from the purchase of publishers to the sale of books to end consumers is only about 30% of the pricing. Coupled with the rise of online bookstores, most people do not buy books in physical bookstores with higher discounts, and bookstore sales are completely insufficient to cover rent and labor costs. Taking the road of cultural and creative space is a method of forcing out, but it is also an innovation.

Some people will complain that bookstores have lost the style of serious culture and are not "pure".

The "pure" bookstore is not nothing, do not have to pay rent, so the Xinhua bookstore is still alive, will they go?

Jiang Xun, the founder of Model Bookstore, recently died unexpectedly in the warehouse, which once again turned people's eyes to the plight of physical bookstores. This incident is reminiscent of February 2008, when Luo Zhihua, the owner of the famous second-floor bookstore in Hong Kong, went to the warehouse alone to sort out books during the Spring Festival holiday, and was crushed by collapsed books.

The bookstore on the second floor is a scenery in Hong Kong's cultural circles, which itself moved upstairs because the profits of books were not enough to pay the high rent on the first floor, and the Qingshu Bookstore had long been closed in 2006 due to business difficulties, And Lo Chi-wah moved books to the warehouse, looking forward to a comeback, but "book lovers are buried in books".

After the Jiang Xun incident, the "wind tunnel" of the Phoenix Network published an article on Jiang Xun's entrepreneurial process, entitled "The Most Beautiful Bookstore" Owner Fell: Poetry and Distant Places, and Debt Collection Calls", which mentioned that in 2020, Jiang Xun opened two stores and closed two stores, both of which were contract expired, really unable to maintain, and forced to close.

In such an era of industry decline, there are still people who adhere to ideals and make people move.

But "generating electricity for love" is ultimately unsustainable, and the bookstore's business model needs to be reformed. Model Bookstore is already on the way to try, we also see a lot of other bookstores in exploration, the content is slightly different, such as the combination of pioneer bookstores and tourism, in tourist attractions and beautiful countryside to revitalize rural culture; Sisyphus bookstores and commercial real estate combined, in each mall to open stores to enhance the cultural taste of space; Halloween relies on university scholars to do cultural salons, there are also examples of investment failures, such as words and several. But in essence, it's all about selling space and experience, not the books themselves — there's nothing wrong with that, it's the efforts in the market to change with the times, improve formats, and provide consumers with better and more sophisticated products.

Oral/written translation, physical bookstores, are once prosperous, regarded as "high cultural value" industry, after the decline of the industry with the change of the times, there are also many cultural people sighing, while calling for to retain our elegant culture, can not let them disappear.

But in fact, occupation is only the carrier of culture, there is no permanent thriving occupation in this world, the work of lighting gas lamps will disappear because of the popularity of electricity and municipal street lamps, the people who write letters will lose their jobs because of the increase in the literacy rate of the whole people, and the culture will be passed on in one way or another - even if it will change from the original state. The so-called "elite" and so-called "high cultural value" are all exceptions.

What's more, "cultural values" are very personal, very hierarchical judgments, and in the famous British satire "Yes, Chancellor", Haq first (out of the motivation of winning votes) believes that the uninhabited art gallery should be demolished and the subsidy should be paid to football clubs that are more valuable to civilians. However, Humphrey, a civil servant, believes that public funds cannot be used to subsidize "crude pop culture" and that "we have an obligation to provide the public with elegant art". After some maneuvering, the two middle classes cancelled plans to demolish the art gallery and happily set off to see a performance at the Royal Opera House, which received an annual subsidy of £9.5 million and sold for £30 a ticket.

However, for vanishing occupations, individuals can only adjust their behavior; for declining industries, business agents need to change their methods of doing business; but for institutions, as Anthony Towns argues in The Inside of Bureaucracy, after the task of creating institutions for them is completed, the institutions themselves will look for new goals to prove their existence and the significance of the consumption of public funds.