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老猫没了

从泰国出差回来之后，同事告诉我老猫不在了，或者更确切地说，是“被处理了”。

我们去五层看了，果然她住的纸板箱被收走了，平台上空空荡荡的，老猫已经不知所踪，只留了一个盛着猫粮的碗。

我一方面很心疼，另外一方面，竟然有点麻木——这也许就是命运，不期而至地。只是过去怕被她的爪子挠，一直都没能抱抱她，总想着下次，结果以后都没机会了。

在曼谷的时候，有个华人讲，泰国人对生死看得很开。即使有人意外死亡，亲戚朋友也一般不怎么伤心，他们觉得逝者不过是转世投胎，再入轮回而已。老猫今生受了那么多苦，下辈子肯定能脱离畜生道了，起码能投胎长成个大美女吧。

Es muss sein.

老猫

五楼晾衣服的平台上有只猫，是只黑灰条纹相间的大花猫，我很喜欢的类型。

据说它年纪很大了，相当于人类的80岁；脾气也不小，平时总是趴在一只空调室外机上面，冷冷地观察来往平台的人，最喜欢趁人不备“喵”地尖叫一声吓人。
前几个月受人之托，断断续续地喂过它一阵子，以为跟它混很熟了。下午去收衣服的时候又遇见它，手欠加嘴贱，上去摁住它就是一顿乱摸，嘴里还念叨：“喜不喜欢我？喜不喜欢我？”
冷不防地，人家扭过身来，一声不吭地亮出了指甲和牙齿。武器还很锋利，算是宝刀不老。低头一看，右手上留下的印子红红的，不很深，但也有点疼。它老人家倒是一点也不内疚，站起身来头也不回地走了。
收好衣服的时候它在远处蹲着，瞪圆了眼睛望着我，好像在纳闷说，“这小傻妞是谁啊？”估计到我离开香港的时候，它也不会搞明白我是谁，是不是有这么个人来过。
还好我一如既往地坚强，好了伤疤忘了疼。

旅行的意义

为戒绝网瘾，防治精神病，坚持了半年多没上开心网，最后还是晚节不保被拖下水。除了贩卖人口，贴条报警，还安装了一个叫“足迹”的组件，看看自己都到过地球上哪些地方，结果发现祖国大好河山去了连一半都不到。天气太冷，时间不够，财力不足，天时地利人和都不占，但还是想出去透口气。

12月中旬后，觅友作短途旅行的，大大欢迎。

擦擦克林和三聚氰胺

前几天在办公室向JR和舒美女等同学大力推荐了最近一直在用的“擦擦克林”，主要用于去污，能轻松擦掉电话机、电脑键盘、白色家电等表面上附着的顽渍，效果惊人的好。擦擦克林样子长得像一块白色的大海绵，各大超市有售，图片见下：

 

细心的人妻JR用过之后心存疑虑地问我，能擦那么干净，会不会有毒？刚刚想起这事就顺手搜了一下，结果令人大吃一惊：原来这玩意儿的成分是melamine！什么，你问我melamine是啥？凭借某社一名one-way translator的专业素养，我可以很负责任地告诉你，它就是最近名声大噪、风靡一时的三鹿奶粉事件始作俑者——三聚氰胺！不信的人自己google去！

尽管“擦擦克林”号称是靠纳米技术的物理原理去污，但想起来还是有点不放心。化学咱也不懂，高中还在氟列扬手上考过不及格，拿毒奶粉的核心保密成分去污这事到底靠不靠谱啊？还卖得贼贵！钱少命贱，不舍得扔啊！

请各位给我们办公室的美女们想个法支个招！

谨以此文献给亲爱的小白兔女士和大灰狼先生（转自何主任处）

ear Tim

shall by too door doll by too jack won

dolphin long can Jim shall by too low

shall by too when doll low,doll car low

dolphin long doll Ham Eason

“more power!”

翻译：

(一 天）
(小 白 兔 到 大 白 兔 家去 玩）
(大灰 狼 看 见 小 白 兔 了 ）
(小 白 兔 闻 到了 了，躲 开 了）
(大灰 狼 大 喊 一声）
(莫跑！）

译名室的故事（生动！精彩！！）

You Say Phelps, China Officials Say Feierpusi
10,000 Olympians Awarded New Names;

‘Splendid Pork Fat’?
By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
AUGUST 19, 2008

The Wall Street Journal

 

BEIJING — To the rest of the world, he’s Michael Phelps, the American swimmer who snagged eight gold medals. But for most Chinese here, he’s Maikeer Feierpusi.

 
Like all of the other approximately 10,000 athletes competing in these games who aren’t Chinese to begin with, Mr. Phelps has been assigned a Chinese name. The names are used to introduce the athletes to a vast domestic audience for whom Western names are just so much Greek.

The job of coming up with all those names falls to the seven members of the Xinhua News Agency’s Proper Names Translation office. "One nation, one person, one name!" declares Li Chun, the director of the team referred to respectfully by his colleagues as "professor."

Assigning Chinese names is no easy task. Because Chinese has no alphabet, each syllable must be approximated with a character. And since every character has a meaning, translators must also seek to avoid those characters with negative or weird connotations.

The characters in Feierpusi (pronounced "fay are poo suh"), for example, could be read to mean "luxurious," a pronoun for "you," "common" and "this," although they don’t communicate any specific meaning when combined. Women tend to receive more feminine characters; men, more masculine ones.

While their countrymen tumble and dive for fame, the translation office’s members take satisfaction from less-visible achievements. Li Zhenjie, who has been translating names for 18 years, says she noticed from the Olympic rolls that the Belarusian name Siarhei and the Russian name Sergey are actually pronounced roughly the same. Thanks to her, Siarheis and Sergeys, which used to have two different translations, are now both known as Xie er gai (pronounced a bit like "she are guy").

"To do this job you have to be able to sit still for a long time," she explains.

"For young people, it’s not great fun to join our office," Mr. Li, her boss, acknowledges.

But the office grasps the seriousness of its role. Left in the hands of an imprudent translator, name creation can cause a heap of trouble. In the 1920s, beverage giant Coca-Cola Co. famously encountered this problem when shopkeepers created characters to identify the soda. Depending on dialect, the literal translations ranged from "bite the wax tadpole" to "female horse stuffed with wax." Today, Coke’s Chinese name Kokou Kole means "delicious" and "enjoyable."

At these Games, a rumor is circulating among the athletes that one Australian swimmer’s name translates to "splendid pork fat." Mr. Li shakes his head. No such name would have come out of his office, he insists.

The Proper Names Translation Office was founded in the 1950s as part of an effort to unify and standardize the country. Once reliant on card catalogs, the office now maintains a computer database that’s used as a reference for all Chinese media. The office also expanded its responsibilities to include developing Chinese names for companies, technologies and weapons. Unstable states, whose leaders change frequently, also keep them busy.

A bookish bunch, the office members work in an ivy-covered building out of three rooms lined with books and musty card-catalog drawers. They treat name generation as a science. New recruits must go through years of having their names double-checked by senior members of the staff, called professors, before earning the right to add names into the master database on their own.

One recent day, Ms. Li and another professor checked on the work of a new recruit.

"This athlete is from Portugal so the ‘Jose’ in his name should be pronounced as ‘ruoze’ rather than ‘yuese’," said Ms. Li.

Her colleague nodded. "Yes, he must have pressed the wrong button when using the database," she said, referring to the new translator.

"The young are sometimes careless," Ms. Li responded.

When a request for a new name comes in, Mr. Li says he first checks it in the database. If he can’t find it there, he pulls out Xinhua’s answer to the Rosetta Stone: a tattered chart featuring guidelines for approximating the sounds of 55 languages in Chinese.

From there, it’s a process of trying to fit square pegs into round holes. Silent consonants, dubbed "eaten words," get dropped. Also to be avoided: rare characters, characters with negative connotations and adjectives indicating size, age and direction.

The transition into Chinese, in which every character is pronounced as one syllable, tends to make otherwise short names seem long, and can make already long ones seem interminable. Usually the maximum is eight characters, but there are exceptions, as for Thailand’s gold-medal-winning weightlifter Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarakoon. In Chinese, she’s an equally challenging Bapawadi Zhalunladanadalagong.

As hard as the office tries to match sounds, the translations can sometimes create momentary mix-ups. At an Olympic basketball game in Beijing, American player Dwyane Wade says he was left wondering whom the crowd was cheering for. "Way Duh! Way Duh!" roared his fans. "I’ve been getting a lot of that," says Mr. Wade, shooting guard for the Miami Heat. "I know that it’s got to be my name; it’s closer to my name than anyone else on the team."

Athletes aren’t the only ones sometimes confused. Mr. Wade says somebody likely more familiar with his Chinese name slipped a note under his door addressed to "Weird." The NBA player didn’t take offense.

A Name of Their Own
Listen to — and see — the Chinese translations of some famous Olympic athletes’ names.

English Chinese Characters Pinyin Selected Characters’ Meanings Pronun-ciation
Usain Bolt   Yousaien Boerte Block or stop up; kindness; abundant; special  
Kobe Bryant   Kebi Bulaiente Cloth; kindness; special  
Dwyane Wade   Dehuaien Weide Virtue; kindness; leather; cherish  
Michael Phelps   Maikeer Feierpusi Wheat; to overcome; cultured; universal  
Lionel Andres Messi   Liangneier Andeliesi Meixi Benefit; expensive; fiery; peaceful; virtue; cultured; plum; west  

Notes: Pinyin is the Chinese Romanization system. | Names are given in Western order, although in Chinese last names are given first. | The characters included in the names have meanings, but when put together in the name, they mean nothing specific.
Many athletes embrace their alternative names. Ian Thorpe, the gold-medal winning Australian swimmer from the Athens Games, says in an interview that he learned the Chinese characters for his name, Suopu. He even takes a stab at scribbling the characters.

But a significant number of athletes do wander from the official script. At the Olympic village, more than 1,000 athletes, coaches and officials have stopped by the Chinese cultural center to get a Chinese name based less on sound and more on culture and meaning. Verena Joos, a German track cyclist, is officially Weileina Yaosi, which contains little meaning.

Thanks to the center, her other Chinese name is Long Weina, meaning "dragon," "radiant" and "feminine." About 100 athletes had cultural center teachers write their unofficial name on an arm or leg.

The Proper Names Office says it doesn’t mind a little competition. "It’s all right for the athletes to come with their own Chinese names. But only our translations will be on their badge," says Chen Youming, the most senior member of the office.

—Juliet Ye contributed to this article.
Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com