At a glance
- The so-called "Great Translation Movement" is essentially a decentralized anti-China movement under the name of "Translation" around the @TGTM_Official of Twitter accounts. Most of the active participants in this movement have obvious anti-China tendencies, and many of them are supporters of "Taiwan independence," "Hong Kong independence," and "Tibet independence."
- @TGTM_Official claims to be the information hub of the "Great Translation Movement" with the purpose of "truly reflecting" the remarks of Chinese netizens, but there are various factual and grammatical errors in the so-called Chinese netizens' speeches that it translates.
- Data show that as of April 21, the campaign under the banner of "cross-cultural exchange" was still just a kind of "self-carnival" in Chinese-speaking circles, and its influence in the world was still limited.
Event background
In early March 2022, a campaign with the banner of "translation" was launched on overseas social platforms. More and more messages and comments from Chinese Simplified networks are being translated into various languages, labeled as the "Great Translation Movement," and posted on Western social platforms dominated by Twitter.
On April 10, Twitter user @bys8r7kv57 posted a video on the platform claiming to show Shanghai "government workers turning 'anti-epidemic materials' into 'ordinary goods' for profit", translating the Chinese dialogue part of the video into English and carrying the label "#大翻译运动". The tweet was then @TGTM_Official retweeted by a Twitter account called the "Official Tweet of the Great Translation Movement."
After checking this information, the "surging Mingcha" found that the so-called "government workers reselling the materials in the video" was not true. The person in charge of Xu's Agricultural Development Co., Ltd., Yancheng City, Jiangsu Province, the supplier of related goods, told The Paper that the materials that appeared in the video in the Runjiang Huayuan Community in Songjiang District and labeled "Jianhu County's High-quality Agricultural Products Rush to Aid Greater Shanghai" were "group purchase" products sold by the company to the residents of the community, not donated products.
However, this false information was unpritically translated into English and disseminated on overseas social platforms such as Twitter to attack the current situation of epidemic prevention and control in China. So, what exactly is the "Great Translation Movement" associated with this tweet? How is it different from a daily "translation" activity? Are the messages that have been "translated" credible? Who is planning and participating in this movement?
Mingcha
What is the Great Translation Movement?
@TGTM_Official claimed to be the "official push number of the Great Translation Movement." The so-called "TGTM" is the acronym of "The Great Translation Movement" in English. The account, which registered on March 7, 2022, claims to be "The Fourth Rights Rover, a scandal-wielding a scandal in hand, and wearing a crown from the gutter," but said it was not responsible for the original content in its account and was not officially certified by Twitter. As of April 14, @TGTM_Official had posted more than 480 tweets, more than 70 percent of which were in English. The vast majority of these tweets are presented in a combination of graphics and text. @TGTM_Official suspected of intercepting some of the messages or remarks circulating on Chinese social platforms and making so-called "translations" of Chinese parts of the remarks or messages.
@TGTM_Official the main page of your account.
A Google search for "The Great Translation Campaign" reveals an article published by Deutsche Welle on March 12, 2022, which is suspected to be only Chinese version. The article mentions that the so-called "big translation movement" first arose in a Reddit community called ChongLangTV, which has about 53,000 members on Reddit, but was disbanded in the name of "exposing the privacy of others" after exposing the real identity of a Weibo user who claimed to refuse to send money from Shanghai to Ukraine through the Swift system in early March. Some chonglangTV members then went to Twitter and began using hashtags such as "The Great Translation Campaign" and "TheGreatTranslationMovement" to publish content translated into English on The Chinese Network, and registered for "The Great Translation Movement Official Push Number" to centralize information.
According to Deutsche Welle, individual participants in the "Great Translation Movement" said in an interview that the original intention of forming the "Great Translation Movement" was to "hope that people in more countries can understand that Chinese is not 'warm, hospitable, and gentle' as the image in the CCP's great foreign propaganda, but a collection of pride, arrogance, populism, cruelty, bloodlust, and no sympathy." Its ultimate goal is to make people of Chinese descent all over the world "ashamed of their ignorance."
The overseas network of the overseas edition of the People's Daily pointed out in an opinion article on March 29 that the "Great Translation Movement" one-sidedly intercepted and translated some extreme remarks on Chinese social media, and the labeled messages transmitted to foreign audiences had obvious anti-China tendencies and inducements. As soon as this article was published, it aroused strong dissatisfaction among the participants of the "Great Translation Movement". On April 1, @TGTM_Official used words such as "junk reading" to insult the People's Daily, and the account was subsequently suspected of being reported; on April 2, @TGTM_Official was listed by Twitter as a "restricted account" and temporarily restricted; on the same day, fans of the "Great Translation Movement" represented by "Accustomed to a Person", "Hoshino Yuri" and "EWDSD YDSEW" began to create a telegraph channel "The Great Translation Movement". "Accustomed to a Man" (@usedtosolitude), the administrator of the telegraph group, changed the screen name to "Drop Forever" on Twitter and made the channel linked public. As of April 14, the "Great Translation Movement" telegraph group had more than 570 members.
On April 2, @TGTM_Official was listed by Twitter as a "restricted account" and temporarily restricted.
Although @TGTM_Official claim that the "Great Translation Movement" did not set up any official telegram groups, from the groups founded by people such as "Habitual One", people can still glimpse the current sketching mode of the "Great Translation Movement": some members who are familiar with the domestic media environment are responsible for finding materials, sending them to groups or individuals, and then members of the group who are good at foreign languages translate the corresponding content, and some members integrate the content into the form of pictures, and finally forward it to foreign social platforms by other members. In addition to English, some remarks are translated into Japanese, Korean, Ukrainian, French, Arabic, etc., and are delivered to people in the countries where the information is concerned.
Overall, this is a decentralized mode of operation, although there will be some "experienced people" who occasionally give "guidance". Due to the lack of a unified organization, there will also be large differences of opinion among the participants of the different "Great Translation Movements". For example, for the choice of translation materials, some members suggested that "the most vicious and fascist statements should be translated", but others suggested "taking the moderate route" and "translating truthfully". On Twitter, some members believe that the "Great Translation Movement" should unite "Falungong" and the early anti-China "democracy movements," while other members scorn anti-China activists such as the Great Epoch And @__inty__, believing that they are "extreme" or "no level."
Screenshot of the Telegram group of the "Great Translation Campaign".
Who is involved in the Great Translator Movement?
"@usedtosolitude" is the creator of the above-mentioned telegram group, with more than 8,000 followers on Twitter and more than 6,700 posts since the account was created in November 2021. "Accustomed to a person" tweeted to the top of the tweet to claim that of the more than 6,000 tweets, more than 5,000 were insulting and anti-China. The purpose of her participation in the Great Translation Movement is to let the "foreigners" see the "real face" of the Chinese.
Screenshot of the "accustomed to a person" Twitter account interface.
@maozedongguilai is another active participant in the Great Translation Movement. There are clues that he may even have been an early initiator of this "great translation movement." On March 30, @maozedongguilai retweeted a tweet he had posted on March 1 that appeared as a set of translated images of comments left in comments sections of Bilibili's video site. @maozedongguilai said it was "the first tweet of the Great Translation Movement" and that it had "personally moved from Surf TV."
On the same day, @maozedongguilai also retweeted another tweet that he had posted on March 2, which included the words "I announce that from today onwards, a great translation campaign will be launched." @maozedongguilai called it the first manifesto of the Great Translation Movement, saying that "it was only after this tweet that the Great Translation Movement label was born." A Twitter user named @wennx2012 also endorsed @maozedongguilai, saying that "reliable sources show that the first 200 tweets of the Big Translation Movement were made by @maozedongguilai alone."
@maozedongguilai claimed to have carried the first tweet of the Great Translation Movement.
@maozedongguilai joined Twitter earlier than "accustomed to a person", the former has posted more than 52,000 tweets since registering an account in April 2020, and the cumulative number of followers has exceeded 20,000. @maozedongguilai and "Used to Being Alone" have been friends with each other, and have also forwarded each other's tweets. In tweets from "accustomed to a person" and @maozedongguilai, "Chinese" is often replaced by obviously insulting terms such as "indochina pig", "white maggot", "rotten person", etc., and they call themselves "anti-thief".
As in the case of "accustomed to a person" and @maozedongguilai, among those who participated in or cared about the "Great Translation Movement", there were not a few people who had strong hostility and dislike for "China" and "Chinese". "Surging Mingcha" crawled and analyzed the interaction data (likes, retweets, comments, and quotes) under more than 300 tweets of the @TGTM_Official account since its creation on March 7, and found that as of April 4, a total of 27,863 Twitter accounts had interacted with @TGTM_Official on the Twitter platform, of which 562 Twitter accounts with an average interaction frequency of 1 or more times a day, that is, the total number of interactions was 34 or more, accounting for about 2% of the total.
With the help of the Nlpir/Vader word segmentation system, "Surging Mingcha" conducted a natural language processing text tendency analysis (nlp sentimental analysis) of Chinese and English China-related messages in the top 100 Twitter accounts with a total number of interactions between March 20 and April 20, except for the "Great Translation Movement", and found that more than 65% of the more than 6,000 China-related messages posted by these accounts showed a negative attitude towards China, such as criticism, abuse, and unfriendliness.
In addition, of the 100 accounts that actively interact with @TGTM_Official, more than one-third of the accounts follow the "Voice of America" (@voaChinese), "Deutsche Welle" (@dw_Chinese), "Radio Free Asia" (@RFA_Chinese) and other media that have been carrying out anti-China propaganda for many years, and more than one-third of the accounts are fans of well-known anti-China Twitter accounts such as @__Inty__ and @lelefarley.
It is worth noting that as more unfriendly people pay attention to the banner of "great translation", this text movement fermented in cyberspace has also begun to be exploited by some separatists, such as "Hong Kong independence" and "Taiwan independence" supporters. It was verified that among the top 10 Twitter accounts with the highest number of interactions with @TGTM_Official, the most positive responders to the Great Translation Movement, there were at least 3 (@fight_for_h/@democracy_forhk/@tweet4852) radical Hong Kong independence supporters. While actively relaying news from @TGTM_Official, they also publicized various protests in support of "Hong Kong independence".
Using accountanalysis.app to analyze the tweet languages of the 100 accounts that actively interacted with @TGTM_Official, it was also observed that 52 of these accounts posted tweets in Chinese as the first language, and 41 and 4 accounts used English and Japanese as the preferred language, respectively. It's worth noting, however, that almost all of the above accounts have used Chinese to tweet, and Chinese are the first, second, or third languages used by 90% of the accounts. That is to say, although the "Great Translation Movement" claims that it is aimed at people outside of China, that the world wants to "see" China clearly, and that it uses English, Japanese, Arabic and other languages to publish tweets, the vast majority of active participants in the "Great Translation Movement" are actually chinese insiders who are not unfamiliar with the context of Chinese. There are very few real outsiders, the target audience of the Great Translation Movement. Overall, the movement under the banner of "cross-cultural exchange" is more like a "self-carnival" in the Chinese-speaking circle, and its influence in the world is still very limited.
Is the "translated" content accurate?
Yan Fu, a modern Chinese translator and educator, translator of Adam Smith's "Original Wealth", Montesquieu's "Law and Intention" and Huxley's "Heavenly Speech", proposed that translation pursues three standards, namely "faith", "da" and "ya". Of the three, "letter" is the basic requirement for translation. "Letter" means that the meaning does not contradict the original text, that is, the translation should be accurate, not deviate, not omitted, and not arbitrarily add or subtract meaning. Since the "Great Translation Movement" is under the banner of "translation", are many of the works it translates on Twitter true and accurate?
On March 28, @TGTM_Official suspected of translating a user statement from the Bilibili video platform, including a sentence Chinese "I even have motivation to work", which was translated as "I don't even have strength to work", which means "I don't even have the strength/strength to work", which is obviously contrary to the original meaning of its Chinese. It can be seen that in terms of the basic skills of translation, the participants in this "movement" have not yet cultivated at home.
On April 1, @TGTM_Official said in a post on the platform that Chinese officials had stated that "there is no upper limit on the relationship between China and Russia, and it is not aimed at any third party." The accompanying image shows a screenshot of the message from CCTV News' official Microblog and an English translation of white characters on a black background.
After verification, on March 30, CCTV News did release a message from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, saying that "Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin presided over the Foreign Ministry's regular press conference held today." Wang Wenbin said that there is no upper limit to Sino-Russian cooperation, we strive for peace without an upper limit, maintain security without an upper limit, oppose hegemony without an upper limit, and Sino-Russian relations are not aligned, not confrontational, and not aimed at third parties." However, it can be seen from the words that the CCTV message has never mentioned the statement that "there is no upper limit on Sino-Russian relations". The so-called "unlimited limit" is only aimed at the cooperation between China and Russia in striving for peace, maintaining security, and opposing hegemony. As for the attitude of China's China-Russia relations, the words mentioned in the message are "non-alignment, non-confrontation, and no targeting of third parties."
@TGTM_Official expressing "unlimited cooperation" as "unlimited relationship" is a concept change. According to the information on the official website of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on March 30, 2022, at a regular press conference chaired by Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, a Reuters reporter asked Wang Wenbin: "Before the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics, the Chinese and Russian heads of state said that there was no upper limit on cooperation between the two sides. What does it mean for the two countries to expand cooperation now? To what extent should cooperation be expanded? What areas will be covered? Wang Wenbin then made the above answer. The English translation of Wang Wenbin's answer by the "Great Translation Movement" is actually not authentic. In fact, before @TGTM_Official posted the tweet, the English page of the Foreign Ministry's website had already translated and published the English translation of Wang Wenbin's answer:
"There is no limit to China-Russia cooperation in the pursuit of peace, no limit to our efforts to safeguard security, and no limit to our opposition to hegemony. China-Russia relations feature non-alliance, non-confrontation, and non-targeting of any third party."
@TGTM_Official translation posted on Twitter.
Tweets that @bys8r7kv57 posted after Twitter was labeled "#大翻译运动" and were @TGTM_Official retweeted are even more out of the category of "translation" itself. The translator added four lines of small print above the first eight seconds of the video, saying that "the video shows government workers turning 'anti-epidemic materials' into 'ordinary goods', so that they can get profits at zero cost", which has since been falsified.
In addition to the problem of inaccurate translations, there are many grammatical errors in the translations published @TGTM_Official. For example, on April 1, @TGTM_Official used the expression "Russia claims U.S. using Ukrainians for in vivo studies" when translating the CCTV news report that "Russia claims that the United States used Ukrainians for living research", which is not authentic, and the use of the word "claim" in the sentence is not in line with English expression habits.
From this point of view, this online movement under the banner of "translation" and claiming not to be responsible for original content is not as real as it advocates. The account prides itself on being the information hub of the "Great Translation Movement" with the purpose of "truly reflecting" the remarks of Chinese netizens, but there are various factual and grammatical errors in the so-called Chinese netizens' speeches translated by it.
Overall, the campaign in the name of "translation" is essentially a decentralized anti-China campaign around the @TGTM_Official of Twitter accounts. Most of the active participants in this movement have obvious anti-China tendencies, and many of them are supporters of "Taiwan independence," "Hong Kong independence," and "Tibet independence." Despite claiming to target overseas non-Chinese groups, the data shows that as of April 21, the movement under the banner of "cross-cultural exchange" was still just a kind of "self-carnival" in Chinese circles, and its influence in the world was still limited.