What I found particularly moving was PM’s statement this morning, especially as it was a live broadcast, less than 5 hours after the event. In the English broadcast he spoke as a leader of nation to his people about the death of another leader. He never used the word ‘my father.’ But in the Chinese broadcast he spoke of the hospitalisation, the gratitude of his family for the well-wishes, and their grief: there is a moment where he very nearly broke down and took 7-8 seconds to recover.But if the Chinese statement was moving, I thought the English statement was beautifully crafted — balanced, precise, a tribute that did not harp on achievement, and just tender enough without being maudlin, but also forward looking.
I am slightly bothered by the translation in certain Chinese-language media of “What did I give up? My life.” as “我放弃了什么？我的生活。” 生活 sounds far too frivolous, as if the sacrifice is simply his work-life balance, but obviously we don’t expect 生命 in this context, he didn’t lay down his life in combat or was killed for his beliefs. I think I would have preferred something on the lines of 一生 or 一辈子, both to convey duration and effort in everyday life. Come to that, I’m not sure 放弃 quite conveys the element of 牺牲 which ‘give up’ entails. (As of this evening I’m also beginning to see some sites translate ‘life’ as 生命 which sounds very wrong to my ears.
There is also something intensely deadening about Chinese translated into English (not confined to this particular statement, in general I dislike English translations of Chinese texts.)Take the line PM broke down in the middle of: 由始至终，李先生最关心的就是新加坡的存亡。Official PMO translation: “Singapore’s survival was Mr Lee’s greatest concern throughout his life.” One can’t fault it technically, but it is so dull, without any of the colour of the Chinese original. 由始至终 does mean ‘throughout his life’ but conveys a kind of dogged persistence that the English does not. 存亡 is a poetic expression with Classical Chinese derivation, literally ‘existence-annihilation’, a word perched right upon the life/death binary, the word itself contains seeds of both survival and destruction, precarious as the precariousness of the state it depicts. Of course they translated it correctly and soundly, they could not have written “Singapore’s survival (or not) was his greatest concern. But the uncertainty is inherent in the word, that existential, Hamlet question.
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