Jianjun's Blog

The first Boomtown Beijing（北京沸腾）screening was presented on April 20 at Yugong Yishan（愚公移山）in Beijing. I am honored to have the opportunity to interview the awarding-winning Singaporean producer, the director of the documentary, Tan Siok Siok. She was talking about the screening and music used in the film.

Boomtown Beijing is arranging a screening in the USA this June. For the latest information visit Boomtown Beijing web site.

Enjoy the trailer:

Interested in helping organize a local screening? Please contact: boomtownbeijing [at] gmail.com

The ideal venue should have:

1. A capacity of 80-120 audience;
2. Good sound facility;
3. Ready marketing database to help publicize the screening;

Examples are:
1. Popular club, theatre or arts cafe;
2. Universities and colleges;
3. Business associations and clubs;

Today I saw an ad for a ‘high intelligence community’ on Facebook.

The pictures it used to attract attention are Dalai Lama and Ma Ying-jeou (current Taiwan ‘President’ and Nationalist Party leader). The advertisement uses the following text to go with the pictures:

• East China or West China, which region has better IQ? (title)
• Take our survey and raise the average IQ of the East region. (Tagline)

Obviously the ad indicates, although not necessarily intentionally:

1. There’s an IQ difference between people living in the East China and the West China;
2. The IQ of the East is lower (at least before you take their survey);
3. Dalai Lama is representative of the West, while Ma Ying-jeou is of the East.
4. Dalai Lama’s intelligence could be higher than that of Ma Ying-jeou’s, while Ma Ying-jeou is cleverer than most people living in the East of China.

At this sensitive time, using such culturally and politically sensitive pictures and insulting title/tagline to target the Chinese community shows the advertiser doesn’t have much intelligence, do they?

According to the site’s Chinese ‘About’ page, of the three guys behind the site, two of them are very clever.

Before the main content, a few words about my blog:

Politics is not part of my blog’s coverage. But for the last few weeks, such things infiltrated into this place. Although I categorized them as cultural, I know they are more political. Now my blog is back in normal mode.

Yesterday I attended a translators Powwow. We had lots of discussions about the market, the client, the rates and the quality. Obviously ‘bypassing the agencies to get direct clients and high rates’ was of great interest to many translators. But there were agency representatives present. Their feedback was unless you can achieve a high standard of quality, let’s not talk about rates.

A colleague from Italy expressed concern that in her country the rates have been going down. I don’t really know what the situation there in Italy. But rates are dependent upon many factors. Different language pairs have different rates. For some language pairs the market demand is very low while the supply is over abundant (too many translators) – such as between some of the most popular western languages. The market situation for such languages is very challenging. But there are still successful translators who get well paid for their superb quality job.

For some languages, rates could be extremely varied and, needless to say, with very different qualities – Chinese for example. Unless there is a reliable source that can provide true reference for quality translators, it’ll be difficult for both good clients and good translators to recognize one another. One of the purposes for me to attend the meeting was to identify such translators as my partners. Some colleagues expressed similar intent and we agreed a Trusted network is the way to go.

How to identify good translators? I pay more attention to the way they speak, how they socialize and interact with other colleagues than their translating experience. I enjoy working with responsible and optimistic people. Equipped with good language skills, necessary training and correct work attitude, work experience could accumulate through real work. One of the rarest virtues of a translator is the willingness and the ability to self-adjust and self-improve in regards to quality.

I agree with Jeffrey of Insupro who says freelance work makes people seclusive and very characteristic. This is actually detrimental to any collaborative teamwork. Sometimes we see a translator and a proofreader mutually pointing fingers at each other. Translators must realize this problem and be more open-minded and sociable instead of close-minded and bigoted. Even though the nature of the work is such that translators are mostly confined to their little space, I found interacting with social media guys do make me feel better and my mind become more active.

I also had a chance to personally see the guy who copied my content. He doesn’t look like the person who did such things.