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.

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。

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。

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！

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

转眼工作已经三年零两个月了，日复一日地像学生一样翻译无穷无尽的稿子，有心得，有进步，更多的却是倾慕不已和自愧弗如。

今天拿到一篇稿子，领导说有点长但不难，要我今出。急吼吼到快下班才翻完，领导问：不难吧？我说：难，句子有点长，逻辑也不好理解。领导说：还要继续努力啊！

的确，还要继续努力啊！办公室里高山仰止的大牛人太多了，玩命追还是只能望其项背，稿子总被改成大花脸，还不得不心悦诚服；有的牛人（特指某位崔姓女生）在抛弃我社另投高明后，还时常被人念叨说，她翻得可真是好啊；比我们晚入社的新人更是后浪推前浪，搞得我们都要死在沙滩上（最后一句是违心的，只是客气一下，你们不必当真）。

简单总结一下，翻译这活看着简单，但是干一年，三年，五年，十年，真是不一样！唉，比不过人家就跟自己比吧。

奥运期间小J假公务之便偶得男友一枚，众人发挥八卦天性从各个角度对事件进行了Investigative reporting, Roundup和News analysis，并通过多渠道多形式面向各年龄层的受众开展直播滚动式报道，一时间办公室人声鼎沸笑语盈盈，整个礼拜都翻不好稿子，也算是这桩喜事的side effect吧。

今天下午下班和同事在门口碰见了小J的男友小G，只见来者：身高八尺有余，目光炯炯，天庭饱满，气度不凡，颇具阳刚之气，跟我想象中的二郎神、杨逍、小李飞刀都有几分神似，怎一个帅字了得！（此处删去花痴的外貌描写928字）

帅哥小G热情大方地与我们逐一握手，然后开车送一脸幸福小鸟依人的小J回家。小J啊小J，你也有今天！啥也不说了，就跟你俩说一句话：

世界上最远的距离，不是生与死的距离，不是时间的距离，也不是空间的距离。而是我想问你俩何时良心发现请我们吃饭，还要通过博客告诉你！

刘翔，我们都知道你这四年付出了巨大的努力，也忍受了常人无法忍受的伤痛，尤其在13亿人乃至全世界的关注下，面对的压力定是凡人无法想象的。那么，这些是否都成为你临阵退缩的理由？当你第一次应该也是最后一次踏上祖国的奥运赛道的时候，为什么你就不能拿出阿赫瓦里所体现的体育精神，完成这次比赛，赢得世人的尊重？

如果我是你，我走也要走完那110米。我们可以理解腿脚上的疾病是不可违背的自然规律，但退赛的这个决定，实在“太不爷们”。即使在你旧伤复发的情况下，110米也许不是11秒就能完成，而是需要20秒，1分钟，甚至更长的时间。但这样的1分钟将在世界面前宣告中国人的人格尊严和奥林匹克真正的精神：不是金牌，不是“更高、更快、更强”，而是积极参与和坚持到底。这不仅仅事关中国人的面子，也是给自己多年的苦练一个交待，给拿你当作偶像的年轻人一个交待。

刘翔，最后想对你说，奥运会的失利是你人生中一段小小的插曲，我们永远可以从失败和错误中学到更多，让自己的人格更完整，人生更辉煌。希望你可以尽快振作，正视失败，战胜自己，即使不是在田径场上，也一样能绽放出动人的光彩。