Yao Yao: It is not only Huawei that the Western "black translators" have framed

Source: Global Times

Recently, the Us "Wall Street Journal" carefully "quoted" a "quote" from Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei: "Rush, kill while rushing, let the blood stain our road." The Western media then staged a classic drama with false rumors, and Australia's "Daily Telegraph" even falsely said that "Huawei threatens to let the West bleed into a river." However, the truth is that Ren Zhengfei's speech was aimed at Huawei's R&D team that is carrying out technical research, and the original words are a daily saying that Chinese familiar to the ear: "Kill a bloody road." After the "misunderstanding" was clarified, some Western media still refused to admit their mistakes, and the BBC said conclusively that Ren Zhengfei did not understand the British, and that the "Western public living in a peaceful society for more than half a century" did not generally agree with the military vocabulary of Chinese businessmen to encourage morale.

Western public opinion's use of intentional and unintentional mistranslations to misread, smear, and frame China is not a new thing under the sun, but reflects a very profound soft power competition.

First, labeling China with the label of expansion reflects a cultural bias that treats others as its own. The character background of the Chinese nation is the agricultural civilization that relocated to the land, on the natural fertile soil given by the Great River Basin, the farmers will get the harvest as long as they work hard, so they do not seek the expansion of space, but hope for the continuation of time. Confucian culture has always advocated "Wende", and although Confucius approved of the Western Zhou Dynasty's destruction of the Shang as a righteous act for the people, he still had reservations about the Wu King who had to use force, and Mencius was particularly grumpy about the tragic scene of the "blood flowing pestle" in the Battle of Makino. Here, a key difference arises between Chinese and Western cultures – Chinese heavy literature and Western martial arts. As the source of Western civilization, ancient Greece and ancient Rome are typical maritime civilizations, subject to insufficient fertility of the peninsula saline land and the Mediterranean climate of different periods of rain and heat, in order to make up for the food gap can only expand to the outside agricultural areas. After the ancient Romans conquered Egypt, the most important task was to plunder bread and bakers. Until the fall of ancient Rome and the formation of feudal lordship in Europe, the etymology of the word "lord" in ancient English was "the one who guards the bread" - for fear that others would snatch the bread back. To this day, the Western world, which has come all the way from expansionism, colonialism and hegemonism, is still unable to understand the Chinese nation's tradition of foreign relations - "not pretending to seek outside".

Second, the translation of China in misleading terms reflects the public opinion trick of referring to deer as horses. In fact, Western academia has been translating China in the wrong words that it has knowingly made for centuries. American scholar Bao Huashi once did research: Why did European scholars set off "China fever" and "Chinese red" in the 17th and 18th centuries, and suddenly changed to "Chinese cold" and "Chinese black" from the 19th century? The turning of heat to cold and the redding of black are nothing more than a kind of "cultural politics" that belittles the other and elevates oneself, and the translation strategy is a certain cliché used to reinforce the "Theory of Western superiority". Unlike ancient Roman slavery and medieval serfdom in Europe, since the Qin Dynasty abolished feudalism and organized the qi people, the mainstream culture recognized that "the prince will have a kind of peace", which has a historical progressiveness. At the same time, Since ancient times, China has set up a royal history platform to supervise the administration of officials, and there is no doubt that such a political function will dispel the prejudices of Westerners against the so-called Chinese authoritarian dictatorship, so since the 19th century, Western scholars have always mistranslated it as Censorate for "censorship of the people", rather than the Aspection of "supervising officials". In recent years, there have been many similar examples, and American scholars have translated China's insistence on "Taoguang Yang Obscurity" as a hidden force that hides the killing machine, waiting for the opportunity, and the public opinion motives behind it are clearly revealed.

Third, China's image is distorted to reflect our own soft power deficit. In the official discourse of the United States, "soft power" has always been closely linked to "ideological struggle", and the United States has long constructed a kind of "soft hegemony" at the level of international norms, so that any country that does not tolerate the so-called free world order is in a weak position. According to statistics, in the field of contemporary Chinese social sciences, there are 280 keywords derived from the West. In other words, since the 20th century, any historical phenomenon in China can only be explained within the conceptual framework of others, as if without the naming system of others, we cannot understand what we are doing, and the meaning of our lives comes from the definition of others. However, the historical and cultural traditions represented by Chinese and Western languages are very different, and when translating terms and colloquialisms, if they cannot go deep into the cultural and value level, the result will inevitably be unsatisfactory. Therefore, when the Chinese government, businesses and cultural circles interact with the world, the key mission is to reflect the objective differences in ideas between China and the West. Only by making up for the soft power deficit as soon as possible can we objectively display the image of a China that loves the people at home and loves the weak externally, and can we call on more countries to join hands with China to go beyond the path of "a strong country must be hegemonic" in the West and build a more inclusive, inclusive and fair new type of international relations and a community with a shared future for mankind. (The writer is Director of the National Soft Power Research Center of the China Foreign Affairs University)