I saw this thread and it blew my mind:
Wow….
As an author, it is her right to put in or not put into her book what she wants to convey her story.
If she doesn’t want to include translations for artistic reasons, she can.
I’ve read many books where the occasional non-English word is thrown in without a footnote, but generally it can be understood contextually.
I don’t know her book. I don’t know if it’s lightly peppered with Mandarin or if it is a true bilingual book and characters exchange whole sentences in Mandarin.
Of course, the problem with not providing translations and telling readers to look it up themselves is that a direct translation from a dictionary might not convey the meaning the author intended. This is particularly true with colloquilisms.
You could look up the words “lock,” “stock,” and “barrel” in an English to Mandarin dictionary, but it won’t tell you what “lock, stock, and barrel” means. The Mandarin reader would be very confused.
What I do know is that this racist screed is pretty fucking offensive and is a great way to turn people off from reading her book.
I wrote this book for Chinese immigrants like me so I’m going to use language that you white people don’t understand and I won’t provide you with translations to make you feel alienated, and fuck you if you wonder why I did that.
I wonder if she will provide translations in editions not sold to white people so other POC who don’t speak Mandarin can feel more included?
What this does is confirm to me more and more that Woke is all about tormenting white people.
The Woke literary movement has pushed thr “de-colonize your bookshelf” movement for years. Telling you as a white person that you need to read stories from non-white people to understand their experiences. Now it’s saying those non-white people who don’t write in English shouldn’t provide translation, so you are going to do the translations yourself and probably not get it right and not understand what the author was trying to say. There is nothing edifying about that. It’s just a torment to make white readers feel uncomfortable. But fuck them, they’re white.
With this attitude, she might sell a few copies to Woke white people who will never read the book but want to be seen with it on their bookshelves. But for the most part I think white people who see this will opt not to buy the book.
I thought the goal of a writer was to sell as many copies of their book as possible, to spread their story, but I must not be Woke enough to understand how telling the largest book buying demographic in the country to go fuck itself is part of that marketing strategy.
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