Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Yet Another Unsolved Hong Kong Mystery
Gordon Brown was caught calling someone that "bigoted woman," probably because of her remark and rhetoric question on immigration: "All these Eastern Europeans that are coming here. Where are they flocking from?" And for whatever reason, "bigoted woman" was translated by some of the Hong Kong news outlets as "老虔婆." That I guess I will never understand why. I just don't find any sense of the word bigoted from the Chinese translation but as usual I could be wrong--I am covering my hiney here.
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You're absolutely correct, no need to cover your backside here.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it's hard to translate the term into a colloquially-equivalent Chinese term as the Chinese don't ever think of themselves as racists towards other cultures/peoples. This is true of most mono-cultural societies (like Ireland up until the 1990's -- they might have referred to the English as bigots but it wouldn't have occurred to them that they themselves are latently racist). Whereas a "bigot" is quite a usual epithet in multicultural, Western societies perhaps because there is much greater sensitivity regarding ethnic relations.
On the other hand, I'm now wondering how one would translate 老虔婆 into English... "Stubborn old woman" perhaps?
An "Old bag" perhaps ...
ReplyDeleteOr an "old hag"?
ReplyDelete