maxiewawa

I was rooting around Burwood Public Library’s Chinese section and found a Chinese translation of Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time. This kind of thing has always interested me so I applied for a library card and checked it out.

The most daunting thing about this kind of thing is the technical jargon; the best thing about the Chinese language is that it does away with weird sounding words based on Latin and Ancient Greek roots and puts them much more simply. Here are some examples with their English translations.

星系 – Galaxy

An English speaking person would tell you that a “galaxy” is a system of stars. Chinese makes the whole thing much more simpler, because the Chinese word for “galaxy” is literally star-system.

引力 – Gravity

The Chinese word for “gravity” is literally attracting-force. Makes sense. Why do we have to come up with an entirely new word for something that just sucks?

强力 – Strong Nuclear Force

Chinese does away with “nuclear” and just calls it the strong force. I haven’t got to the bit in the book that mentions Weak Nuclear Force but I have a sneaking suspicion about what the Chinese for it is…

超新星 – Supernova

超, the first character means “super”. 新, the second, means “new”. The last one, 星 = star. So we literally have “super-new-star”. Makes sense if you think that nova = new. Confusingly though, a supernova is a star at the end of its life, not at its beginning, but we’ll forgive the Chinese for making that mistake, since it’s just a literal translation of a mistake made in the English.

Incidentally, a supernova is a star that, at the end of its life, explodes. These explosions are so bright that the earliest people who noticed supernovae thought they were new stars instead of old ones that suddenly went bang. Hence the name ‘supernova’. If I can digress once more, the earliest recorded observation of a supernova was made by the Chinese, so why they have adopted our word and not the other way round is a mystery to me. Perhaps it’s my Anglo-centric view of the world, perhaps English did in fact take the Chinese word.

电子，中子，质子 – electron, neutron, proton

Electricity is, in essence, the flow of electrons. Whenever you turn the switch on in something electric, these little electric-thingies called electrons come out of the power socket and flow into your computer, or tv, or whatever it is. Why we call them “electrons” is anyone’s guess; the Chinese didn’t bother coming up with an entirely new word and call electrons electric-things. Neutrons, on the other hand, have no charge, and are called neutral-things. Protons are called 质子, but I can’t work out why.

光子 – proton

It was Albert Einstein who first postulated the idea that light was made up of discrete particles; his ideas caught on, and were ultimately proven; these particles become known as “protons”, from the Ancient Greek photo (meaning “light”) and on (“unit”). In Chinese we call protons light-things. Much easier to remember.

反中子，反质子，正电子，反电子，正子 – Anti-electron, anti-proton, positron

Here’s where we get a little far out.

Each elemental particle (electrons, neutrons, protons etc) has an “anti” equivalent, with the opposite charge (if you’ve read Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons you might remember that the bomb that threatens to destroy everyone is an antimatter bomb).

So a proton, which has a positive charge also has an “antiproton” equivalent, which looks the same except has a negative charge. With regard to the English language, it’s quite easy to say what you mean, you just put “anti” in front of the original word. (So the proton version is called the antiproton.)

Chinese fixes the problem in a similar way. We just put 反 in front of whatever it the original particle is. So if proton is 质子, antiproton is 反质子.

Now, for some strange reason, don’t ask me why, we have another name for the anti-electron. It’s called the positron. If you remember the electron has a negative charge, so its anti- equivalent has a postive charge. Maybe that’s why they sometimes call it the “positron”. I personally think it’s bloody confusing to have another name for the anti-electron and not have one for any of the others but I don’t decide these things.

Chinese also has trouble naming the anti-electron. It’s alternatively called the 正电子 (positive electron) and 反电子 (anti-electron). This is somewhat confusing because they seem to mean the opposite thing, don’t they? The “postive” in “positive electron” refers to the electrical charge (which is positive), but 反电子 (anti electron) refers to the fact that it’s the antimatter equivalent of the electron. Confusing.

I haven’t finished reading A Briefer History of Time but I am impressed with the translation. The best translations are always invisible; that is to say that you shouldn’t be able to ‘see’ the original text, instead you should just be able to go through the translation without realising that it isn’t in fact an original work. It’s a challenging book but it’s so well put together that the translation doesn’t get in the way at all!