Reinventing Translation by Evelyn Nien-Mien Ching

Reinventing Translation: Icons and Dictionaries
Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien
CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp.
37-64 (Article)
Published by Michigan State University Press
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Reinventing Translation
Icons and Dictionaries
Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien

Jean Moulin Université Lyon III, Lyon, France
It is often forgotten that [dictionaries] are artificial repositories, put together well
after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a
magical nature.
—Jorge Luis Borges, Prologue to “El otro, el mismo”
THE DICTIONARY HAS CONSISTENTLY BEEN VIEWED FUNDAMENTAL TO
the act of translation, while icons are conceptual images that, in many
cases, transcend the need for a dictionary and provide a form of automatic
translation. The study of icons and dictionaries makes an apt pairing for
analysis. At what stage in the interpretation of a linguistic unit does
dictionary intervention become necessary? In thinking about when dic-
tionary intervention becomes necessary, it is illuminating to first examine
icons, whose presence implies the disposability of dictionaries, and second to
determine the moment where dictionary intervention exposes an icon’s tran-
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2016, pp. 37–64. ISSN 1532-687X.
© 2016 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.
37
This work originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review, 16.1, Spring 2016, published by Michigan State University Press.
38 Reinventing Translation
sition to another kind of linguistic unit. Does the need for a dictionary indicate
the possibility for a more capacious linguistic experience and a transition to
the symbolic, or does the dictionary’s presence signal an evolutionary trend
away from the graphic and spatial properties of language toward the concep-
tual? In connection with this, have icons been rendered anachronistic by
symbols, or can they create a freestanding linguistic system? Or are icons
simply precursors to richer linguistic elements, like characters or words?
Finally, how can a dictionary’s format clarify how an icon functions?
ICONOGRAPHY
While icons have proliferated with the Internet, they existed as the backbone
of hieroglyphics centuries ago, and in recent decades have been used quite
creatively by Internet start-ups. As both ancient and modern societies real-
ized, cultural forces and repetition of use can reinforce the power of an icon.
Instantaneous recognition of commands, directions, and other forms of com-
munication in public spaces by visitors or nonreaders enables society to
function smoothly; hence the presence of icons on road signs, toilets, airport
spaces, and in places with a concentration of blind or deaf populations. Icons
communicate meaning to an individual without his or her fluency in a specific
or local linguistic culture. They have the capacity to moderate behaviors in
global spaces as they have nonlocal specificity.
For anyone who imagines a global world, icons might represent a possi-
bility for a universal language. Because design is visual, its evolution happens
without the selective and often erratic pressure of verbal influences. Designs
have circulated the globe without having to parallel-evolve with the frequently
less consistent form of oral language. Designs by their very nature are more
global presences than any particular language. But can icon systems replace
extant languages and serve as universal languages? What do such a system’s
shortcomings reveal about what a language needs to produce meaning?
Iconography’s advantages may succeed where translations do not be-
cause they provide immediate visuals that explicate their meaning more
efficiently without generating cultural conflicts. In certain cultures icons
offer an advantageous and intuitive solution, especially if the culture using
Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien 39
Figure 1. My drawing is of Katsuichi Ito’s playful representation of Chinese characters. Ito

adds design changes to characters to make them illustrate the characters’ meanings.
icons is accustomed to viewing writing units as characters rather than

letters—the transition from characters to icons seems more seamless than
that from letters to icons because characters utilize design in a fundamen-
tally operative way. In fact, several artists have capitalized on the design
component of characters and created linguistic units that lie on the border
between characters and images. For example, in Lovely Language: Words
Divide Images Unite, a Japanese artist manages to remake Chinese charac-
ters into icons. Katsuichi Ito’s humorous variations of Chinese characters
(see Figure 1), in which he has visualized the meaning of a number of words
in a pictographic manner, are accomplished by intimations of imagery
imposed on extant Asian characters. While Ito’s work is compelling, it falls
short of making a case for icons because characters, not icons, are still the
arbiters of meaning. Still, in the age of the Internet, Ito’s work implies that
learning Chinese might be easier with iconographical mnemonics. Ito’s
work has company; for decades many language-learning tools have em-
Figure 2. Pages from the novel in Book from the Ground (2008). Courtesy Xu Bing studio.
ployed pictorials to aid the learning of characters. There are many learning
tools that serve as evidence of the growing appeal of iconographic supple-
ments being used in place of the dictionary.
NOVEL ICONS
The artist Xu Bing’s most recent work pushes the limits for iconography,
asserting that iconography can transcend all writing systems by providing
universal intelligibility, not only in airports or United Nations meetings but in
almost all multicultural spaces. Xu Bing’s work is a labor of collection and
discovery as he unearths and composes novels using icons; he shows how
involved it would be to replace the symbols underpinning a narrative with a
complex and copious iconography (see Figure 2). In the exhibition, Xu Bing
includes a novel written in pictographic language, and a companion com-
puter equipped with software programmed to translate words into picto-
grams.1 He writes that Book from the Ground “is a novel written in a ‘language
of icons’ that I have been collecting and organizing over the last few years.
Regardless of cultural background, one should be able understand the text as
long as one is thoroughly entangled in modern life. The user can type English
Figure 3. Samples from Book from the Ground (2009). Courtesy Xu Bing studio.
sentences and the computer will instantaneously translate them into this
language of icons. It can function as a ‘dictionary,’ and in the future it will have
practical applications.” Xu Bing cites the sources for his iconography (see
Figure 3) as derived from “mathematics, chemistry, physics, drafting, musical
composition, choreography, and corporate branding, among others.”
Xu Bing’s iconographic system not only poses the question of whether it is
really possible for every culture to be represented by his iconic system but also
what exactly such a system seeks to achieve. Do we need a transcendent
system of communication that strives for a universally uniform organization
of the world? If the assertion of self is through linguistic expression, there has
to be adequate wiggle room in a linguistic system for the individual to person-
alize symbolic matter—assuming that “personalization” is even possible
(which raises some Wittgensteinian questions about distinctions between
personalized and private language). Sidestepping this deeper philosophical
question, it can be said that most humans require at least the idea they are
personalizing their expressive capacities when they want to. Users might find
that the icon system fabricated by Xu Bing lacks suppleness. Accepting icons
despite could be a sign of linguistic evolution. Xu Bing’s system is an example
of how modernity has influenced the expressive psyche. Individuals are now
more oriented to interface with smartphones than other people and because
of this are more tolerant of a lack of linguistic nuance and sensitivity. More-
over, today there is less pressure than before to aim for translation precision
because of English dominance, translation software, and apps such as
Instagram. With the advent of translation software, the prevailing factors
influencing translation on a basic level are no longer simply people, collabo-
ration, and dialogue. Given that many of Xu Bing’s icons have established
meanings and contexts, is it really possible for them to be recycled and
disconnected from their former contexts and histories? Will Xu Bing’s iconog-
raphy be charged with echoes of their former meanings (see Figure 3)?
In a rather provocative conclusion Xu Bing writes: “Today I have used this
new ‘language of signs’ to write a book that a speaker of any language can
understand; I call it Book from the Ground, an expression of my quest for the
ideal of a single script” (Bing 2006). He writes: “Our existing languages are
based on geography, ethnicity, and culture (including all-powerful English),
and all fall short. . . . Today, the age-old human desire for a “single script” has
become a tangible need” (Bing 2006). His exhibition departs from his other
studies of writing in that the Book from the Ground is essentially an abstraction
of writing itself rather than an appreciation of writing’s aesthetic elements.
The idea of a single script is compelling, but iconography is not exactly script.
In contrast to alphabetic or character scripts, icons resemble design units
more than the composition of linguistic parts. Putting icons side by side in
paragraphs in a book does not make them collectively a writing system, and
Xu Bing’s own self-critiques indicate his own doubts about their status as
writing as well. The artist’s development of the Book from the Ground is a
distillation of images and symbols that do not cohere as writing does, and his
energetic meshing of them can feel artificial to some observers. The icons used
in Book from the Ground emanate the anxiety of influence, becoming in their
new contexts a phantom system bereft of its original home and resurrected
posthaste in a new one. Moreover, handwriting in relation to this system is
rendered an obsolete phenomenon; the human body is rendered irrelevant. In

making such a move to detach language from its physicality and physical
origins, and in the same sense that the intelligence of computers can be called
artificial, so Xu Bing’s language of icons is also artificial. Moreover, it is a
language whose function is not completely verifiable outside the context of
the exhibition. Thus using this system at the expense of all others incurs an
emotional, psychological, and practical price; phantom language produces
phantom relationships, and in many ways arrests acts of genuine translation.
In any case, Xu Bing’s presentation of the advantages and disadvantages of
iconography contributes richly to the arguments about what constitutes
writing. For this, his audiences can be grateful, as declining writing com-
petence is in part due to the abandonment of careful definitions of what
constitutes writing. Moreover, attention needs to be paid to the growing
demands of communication to accommodate the universal, local, global,
and iconographic.
Xu Bing’s iconography is democratic in that it transcends our structures of
knowledge and the limitations of geographic and cultural specificity. It also
reflects the logic of a new reality rather than orienting people to rely on
preexisting text-based knowledge. Xu Bing says, “Comprehension is not con-
tingent upon the reader’s level of education or knowledge of literature, but
instead stems from his/her experiences and way of life. Moreover, this lan-
guage need not be taught or learned through traditional educational models.
Regardless of your cultural background or mother tongue, you will be able to
read this book as long as you have experience of contemporary life. The
educated and illiterate should be able to enjoy equally the pleasure of what it
means to read” (Bing 2006).
Xu Bing’s manifesto provides the ideological interface of technological
literacy. The ideal—that everyone should enjoy the pleasure of reading with-
out textual knowledge—can be accomplished by jettisoning symbols and
replacing them with icons. Rather than viewers having to learn multiple
languages, he proposes to subjugate symbolism to this icon system—in some
sense, to sterilize the symbols that now exist and compose writing systems.
Ironically, with the Book from the Ground, Xu Bing asserts, in an apocalyp-
tic tone, that we are headed toward the end of writing, or the end of what we
know as writing. He felt compelled to write a manifesto to provide the raison

d’être for this trend, describing in great detail his conception of modern
culture as a global culture with a density of international inhabitants who will
remain bereft without a universal script—a problem that will only be aggra-
vated with time. Xu Bing asserts that his idea comes from witnessing the
Chinese struggle for linguistic unity, as evidenced by the creation of a single
writing system despite multiple oral dialects. But his ambition goes beyond
the unification of a country. Xu Bing wants to unify the world through his
iconography, which ultimately derives from a shared market economy. The
Chinese community’s written system strived for collective consciousness de-
spite oral plurality; and thus according to his logic (or a parody of this logic),
the global consciousness must strive for unity through capital exchange. This
is a reductionist view of cultural shared space—as economic pressures
mount, so will pressures to communicate. Moreover, historically, when the
situation and context seemed to require it, the Chinese were able to convert
an entire system of complex characters to simpler versions; Xu Bing’s pro-
posal to adopt and use a new language of icons is advocating simplicity as well.
If China’s linguistic history holds any weight, Xu Bing is not inventing any-
thing but using symbols already existent; he is recycling and redesigning
language around the technology that will harness it.
However, just because a smartphone can use a language does not mean
that humans will respond to it well. Such a language does not represent a
shared sense of one culture—ideologically or aesthetically. While Internet
culture is often assumed to be global culture, some countries remain
unwired.2 Similar to the Chinese language system, which united a population
composed of separate groups who did not share an oral but a written language
system, the icon system might unite the globe that still functions with multi-
ple languages if the iconography can feel as human as it does synthetic. The
Chinese writing system so impressed the monk Kircher that he believed it
might make a universal system of writing for the world (he mistakenly saw
Chinese characters as extremely pictographic.) Because the Chinese language
was already being used by the Japanese, Koreans, Cochin-Chinese, Formo-
sans, and other societies, Kircher felt that it could be adopted by cultures
beyond Asia (Bing 2006). Umberto Eco was fascinated with Kircher’s interest
in Chinese and explains in The Search for the Perfect Language how society’s
search for an unambiguous and universal language led people to examine the
formal properties of extant languages. In this case, seemingly ideographic
languages fared well in the search for a perfect universal language:
Chinese ideography was undoubtedly superior to Amerindian pictography

because it was capable of expressing abstract concepts. Yet, despite the fact
that it also permitted witty combinations (cf. Oedipus, III, 13–14) its decipher-
ment remained too univocal. The Egyptians, Kircher argued, saw in the sign of
the scarab not a mere scarab, but the sun and not the material sun that warms
the world of our sense, but the sun as archetype of the intelligible world.
We shall see that (ch. 10) in seventeenth-century England, Chinese writing
was considered perfect in so far as with ideograms every element on the
expression-plane corresponded to a semantic unit on the content-plane. It
was precisely these one-to-one correspondences that, for Kircher, deprived
Chinese writing of its potential for mystery. A Chinese character was monog-
amously bound to the concept it represented; that was its limitation. (Bing
2006, 160)
Though Kircher’s understanding of Chinese was erroneous, he identified

characteristics important in establishing a universal language. Such charac-
teristics—transparency and lack of mystery, as referred to above—are of
particular importance in an epoch that requires the speedy transmission of
meaning, and both of these are traits of icons. Rapidity of comprehension is a
valuable feature of icons, as they are used for male/female bathrooms, traffic
directions, forms of transportation, restaurants, child or animal crossings,
and so forth. Nevertheless, while icons can satisfy the basic needs of human
beings, are they powerful enough to represent extensive and complex ideas
and concepts?
Xu Bing’s potential solution to translation problems is linguistically com-
parable to efforts such as Chinese simplification, which sought greater liter-
acy, or Esperanto, which sought to transcend the borders of individual
European countries to forge a conception of an integrated Europe. However,
the Book from the Ground iconography actually shifts the problem of transla-
tion from an interlingual one to a media-driven and technological one. His project
illuminates the fact that the operative culture in the twenty-first century is not
linguistic but technological. Translation and other forms of human communica-
tion will increasingly depend on the talent of the handheld device and its software
capacities rather than the human imagination to transcend cultural specificity. In
fact the exchange for transcendence is absence—software translation exhibits
the emptiness and lack of culture specificity rather than transcendence over it.
Book from the Ground language expresses a modernist, globalist, sterile, and tech-
nological culture. Xu Bing writes:
Numeric commands can now be represented as icons, thus turning a special-

ized vocabulary into an intuitive visual one. Now anyone can distinguish
computer functions and operate programs. While the computerization of the
workplace has, on the one hand, resulted in a degree of physical laziness and
degeneration, it has also created a group of people and a physical and technolog-
ical environment easily adapted to this pictographic age. This is reflected in a new
generation of people who find themselves at loggerheads with traditional reading
and captivated by intuitive graphics. The ubiquity of the Internet and the conve-
nience of ever faster trans-global communication and information sharing have
further exposed the limitations of inter-language conversation. As a result, the
language of icons, the Internet, and online gaming, consisting primarily of
pictographs and images, has already emerged in great volume. This vocabu-
lary is developing at lightning speed, of its own accord, and is not bound by the
geographical concepts of the past. (Bing 2006)
When icons are manipulated outside of technology and arranged or drawn by

human hands, they offer a different experience than the readymade Book from
the Ground icons. Xu Bing’s other exhibit pieces roundly show the distinction.
They expose the physical process of manipulating icons; human input be-
comes part of the medium and message. When Xu Bing first began to design
his Book from the Ground system, he experimented with arranging the icons by
hand in a variety of configurations, and one includes a sketch of icons that
narrate a traffic jam. In this configuration, the artist imprints his own individ-
ual design, arranging his icons in a gorgeous cluster (see Figure 4), effusive
Figure 4. Traffic jam sketch (2005). Courtesy Xu Bing studio.
with more visual power than the novel in Book from the Ground, where the
icons are mechanically linear.
In Helsinki-Himalayan Exchange (1999–2000), Xu Bing fuses art and land-
scapes. The Xu Bing studio writes, “Drawing inspiration from the Nepalese
landscape, the artist created a series of works that fused calligraphy and
landscape art, essentially constituting a new form of artistic expression”
(https://xubing.wordpress.com/). Xu Bing continues with the theme of fusing
the perception of the world and the role of writing in enhancing or embellish-
ing that perception with Landscript (2000). On the large plate-glass windows
of a museum lobby, Xu Bing transcribes the landscape by using Chinese
characters to represent individual elements; for example, a clump of trees is
represented by multiples of the character for tree, choreographed to have the
contours and shape of a forest. When a viewer stands on a marked point on the
floor, the calligraphy is superimposed on the objects seen through the win-
dow, resulting in a conflation of text and objects. Thus, the relationship
between the viewer, the window, and the landscape undergoes constant shifts
with the viewer’s position in the gallery. By compelling the audience to engage
with the landscape outside the gallery, this work effectively extends the mu-
seum space beyond the building’s walls and expands its range as far as the
views from the windows. This work is linked to Xu’s interest in the idea of
limning nature and to his exploration of the way humans use signs to repre-
sent the material world.
Landscript (see Figure 5) demonstrates that writing is an interface be-
tween the user and the world but should not be construed as translating the
world or representing its totality or reality. Its impressions, or marks, may in
fact cloud or distort perception as much as it demarcates a space for percep-
tive experience. Landscript also shows us the fragility of language—its ephem-
Figure 5. Landscript (2009). Courtesy Xu Bing studio.
eral nature compared to objects fixed in stone or earth (see Figure 6 for a
painting of a landscape of characters). This exhibit, in contrast to the Book
from the Ground, shows that the subtlety of artistic practice improves human-
to-human communication (see Figure 6). Contrarily, iconography generated
Figure 6. Landscript (2009). Courtesy Xu Bing studio.
by a computer cannot replace human nuance. Iconography and any rollout

version of a single script remain ideals because they are not accountable to
human nuances and to the fact that humans will naturally produce variety in
their self-expression. The natural drive toward linguistic variance and the
policing of any one dominant voice or way of expression make for the most
profoundly human language. To a large extent, the hybridity of language leads
to yet anther degree of recaptured humanity; so that even with the different
cadences, rules, grammar, and perceptive experience that govern the lan-
guage of Chinese and English, the lives and experiences of these language
users can be combined, even momentarily, during acts of translation.
TRANSLATABLES
I am as the majority Chinese, learned very poor and nonsense English in high
school or in college, totally un-useble. Let alone to write.
—Xiaolu Guo, in an e-mail to Evelyn Ch’ien
Your language is your country.

—Paul Léautaud
Like Xu Bing, Xiaolu Guo is a diaspora subject who finds the concept of a
dictionary relentlessly dysfunctional but perseveres to improve upon it. Un-
like Xu Bing, her approach is not to create projects that illustrate profound
conceptual flaws in particular systems and the need to reinvent them; her
approach is to reinvent the already existent genre of dictionary as an as-
you-go tool to learn a culture and to build on her own subjective experience of
diaspora. She calls her dictionary a broken English style dictionary: “[The
dictonary format is a] very natural process when i don’t write and use English
as my mother language, so dictionary form is my first choice.but a broken style
dictionary. it is a play, a narrative game and device, but also as narrative
itself.the language is the narrative in this particular book.”3 How does Guo’s
dictionary compare to and contrast from extant Chinese-English dictionar-
ies? As can be seen from a variety of systems, creating a dictionary is a cultural
Figure 7. Xu Bing experimented in translation, finding equivalents between letters and their
homophones in Chinese (2012). Courtesy Xu Bing studio.
and linguistic negotiation. Though technology has almost obviated the need
for dictionaries in book format, there is still some creative experimentation on
how to author a dictionary and make writing systems mutually receptive.
Many attempts to write Chinese-English dictionaries have resulted in a vari-
ety of structures and sometimes elaborate justifications for them; there are
dictionaries that arrange characters according to graphics, semantics, or
phonetics.4 Modified pinyins exist, raising intriguing questions about the
extent to which pinyins can be modified and used to romanize languages
other than Chinese.5 Xu Bing plays with his own version of Chinese-English
transliteration as well (see Figure 7).
Notably, non-Chinese editors tried to make using Chinese-English dic-
tionaries easier for non-Chinese users by employing alphabetical arrange-
ments, such as John DeFrancis and Zhang Yanyin, who created the ABC
dictionary:6 “All entries are in romanized homophones organized alphabeti-
cally by pronunciation.” DeFrancis and Zhang created new structural logic for
the Chinese-English dictionary with this format. They write: “The ABC Dic-
tionary . . . offers the powerful advantage of arranging entries in a single-sort
alphabetical order as by far the simplest and fastest way to look up a term
whose pronunciation is known . . . the ABC Dictionary enables users to find
words seen only in transcription or heard but not seen in written form”
(https://www.pleco.com/manual/abc.html). This ABC dictionary assumes that
characters should also be romanized because that is how they are organized.
It presents the homophonic equivalents with alphabetized organization and
then their character equivalents.
Another dictionary entrepreneur, Rick Harbaugh, created a Chinese ety-
mological dictionary (zhongwen.com). In the mid-1990s Harbaugh’s etymolog-
ical dictionary provided “character trees,” a visual mnemonic for learning and
remembering characters.7 His visual character histories bring out the inter-
locking relationships of character parts and the coordination of meaning and
design in the Chinese language. Harbaugh’s dictionary reveals relationships
between characters by stroke-by-stroke deconstruction and analysis. He
points out that showing the graphic history of a character—its visual etymol-
ogy—is only one aspect of the dictionary, which hopes to communicate ety-
mological content as well. He compares the dictionary to a taxonomy or
encyclopedia, evoking how taxonomies and dictionaries were considered
equivalent in China during previous centuries: “This printed dictionary pres-
ents a series of zipu or ‘character genealogies’ which show graphically the
close interconnections between over 4000 characters according to the shuo-
wen jiezi and subsequent research by traditional etymologists.” Thus Har-
baugh’s project echoes the efforts of Xu Shen’s original project, with its
ancient radicals and philosophy of radicals. The shuowen jiezi (说文解字) was
a type of dictionary that served as a historiography and scientific text in that it
contained a taxonomy of objects, both animate and inanimate.
All of these authors possess their particular conceptions of how to navi-
gate the rules of Chinese and English. Other established and traditional trans-
literation systems, such as zhuyingfuhao, used by Taiwanese speakers, use
phonetic symbols that have their own unique look to transliterate Mandarin
(among the many characters, four appear thus ㄅㄆㄇㄈ). They can be com-
pared to the Japanese alphabet katakana, which is a Japanese phonetic
system used alongside kanji, or characters that originated from Chinese.

Katakana is often used to transliterate Western names in Japanese contexts.
In comparison to the fluid transliteration that katakana can provide in trans-
lating Western names into Japanese phonetics, translators who want to rep-
resent an English name in Chinese must find characters that most resemble
the sounds in the Western names (which can be a bit unwieldy). So, some-
times pure phonetic systems can serve great purpose in translation.
Because individuals must translate between systems with sometimes
cumbersome methods, they often generate surplus material and explana-
tions. A bicultural dictionary must negotiate a space of dissonance created by
two cultures attempting to affirm their own customs, rules, and designations
of meaning. The justification and the rules that editors create to explain their
methodology of organizing their dictionaries reveal a variety of priorities. For
example, in the Far East Chinese-English Dictionary, the editor writes: “The late
Mr. Yen Fu laid down three cardinal principles for the guidance of translators:
fidelity, readability and literary elegance” (Shih-Chu 1992). These very human
and personal criteria trump other concepts such as precision, formulaic-ness,
and identity. Yen Fu’s requirements are about aesthetics and creativity and,
furthermore, echo the kind of journey of translation advocated by Guo. Along
with new software applications, the efforts of Harbaugh, DeFrancis and
Zhang, and Guo’s Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers demonstrate
how prominent an author’s input can be in the design of a dictionary, and how
rich a dictionary narrative can be if readers consider the words as live experi-
ences and the dictionary’s author as someone who experiences the explora-
tion of reference as one of life’s goals. Guo shows us that a cross-cultural
dictionary is most effective when authorship is acknowledged. Her dictionary
will provide the audience with a reference point from which to understand her
identity, her sense of nationhood, and a sense of her cultural and linguistic
fluency or nonfluency.
SEMI-TRANSLATABLES
As implied earlier, translations often produce a by-product median language,

a phenomenon of linguistic ephemera resulting from transitioning from one
language to another. In cases discussed earlier, editors of bicultural diction-

aries can move from a position of authorship as they navigate the spaces
between two contesting nations and create a third space. This phenomenon is
the basis of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, a novel about
language that at first questions, then undermines, the mission of the Book
from the Ground. It shows that mutual understanding between different cul-
tures can be impossible, even when the motivation for mutual intelligibility is
particularly high—as in the case of two individuals who are in love. Despite the
lack of intelligibility, however, the presence of narrative can explain the seem-
ingly contradictory situation of a relationship existing without a reliably
shareable language.
In the novel, the narrator, a Chinese student arriving in London to learn
English, is overwhelmed with culture shock and disorientation. The basic
elements of life are discomfiting; from her point of view, the food is
inedible, the people cruel, and the entertainment disturbing. After seeing
what she refers to as Mulholland Driver and Blue Velvet at the cinema, she
writes: “Gosh what crazy films. I not understanding very much the English
speakings, but I understand I must never walk in highway at night alone.
The world scary and strange like deep dark dream” (Guo 2007a, 41). Though
she searches for the right words and phrases to describe her experience of
English society, she finds official dictionaries unable to compensate for the
cultural divide she feels. Simple words such as “guest” imply a relationship
entirely different in the two languages: in Chinese language and culture a
guest is someone automatically invited to and entrusted with a stay in one’s
home; in English, the word—as far as the narrator understands—simply
means outsider. Her “dictionary” provides a critique on the very idea of a
dictionary as an efficacious translating force between cultures. She says, “The
idea is to write a novel with each new term the character learned, so it’s like a
dictionary. So I think each section should combine with the story but the
meaning of that term, that vocabulary. So that demands a whole form, it’s like
a song or a music you know, it’s a device, so the rhythm has to be like that, like
short section, like vocabulary (Guo 2007b). In her novel/dictionary she cri-
tiques concepts and words in English because their meanings do not line up
with what she understands in Chinese. Using words like “love,” “home,” “fart,”
“noble,” and “alien,” her dictionary encourages thought about what elements
in a cross-cultural dictionary can speak to live experience, specifically in the
translation between Chinese and English. Her efforts to create a dictionary
remind us that in a foreign culture, a dictionary can, and often should be, a
navigator and lifeline to survival in a new cultural world. Therein lies the
magic of a dictionary; its capacity to carry experience within symbology. Thus
there is not only magic but passion and politics underlying a dictionary’s
architecture.
In her book Guo uses the interstitial space of translation to provide
content, and each chapter represents an effort to define a new word she
learns. She makes the dictionary an exciting event, not a boring read
(although one reader on Amazon states that he/she actually bought the
book, erroneously assuming it was a dictionary). As a rulebook of a cul-
ture’s language, a dictionary provides social worlds; it gives clues to as-
pects and conventions of that culture. For example, Guo describes her
encounter with English humor:
I try to imitate English humor and understand this English humor, how it
works, which is so famous for a foreigner. The culture where I came from, I am
a village person, I come from remote country-side in southeast China for us
when you joke about something you are inside the story, you laugh because of
direct absurdity, rather than indirect absurdity, so this gets very academic
discussion, but its quite crucial [difference] for me to use for this novel I do
need to use this western humor, so when the character make a mistake
because her language is so naive, then I need to write a counterpart, the
English man how he understand her language, her joke, and that becomes
something like humor (Guo 2007b).
By moving between two languages as an author, and playing on the con-

cepts of authorship and dictionary, Guo reminds her audience that both
concepts have a wide range of meaning. The Chinese-English voice she
creates narrates in a version of Chinglish that is deeply embedded in her
own experience.
After grammar class, I sit on bus and have deep thought about my new
language. Person as dominate subject, is main thing in an English sentence.
Does it mean West culture respecting individuals more? In China, you open
daily newspaper, title on top is “Our history decide it is time to get rich” or “The
Great community party have third meeting” or “The 2008 Olympics need
citizens plant more greens.” Look, no subjects here are mans or womans.
Maybe Chinese too shaming putting their name first, because that not modest
way to be. (Guo 2007a, 26)
As she writes, new rules for writing emerge, ones that accommodate Chinese
grammar. Guo finds artistic leverage by representing the space that cannot be
reconciled by the rules of each culture: she shows us that the intraspace is that
where invention begins: “Chinese, we not having grammar. We saying things
simple way. No verb-change usage, no tense differences, no gender changes.
We bosses of our language. But, English language is boss of English
user . . . Gosh, verb is just crazy. Verb has verbs, verbed and verbing. And verb
has three types of mood too: indicative, imperative, subjunctive. . . . Why so
moody?” (Guo 2007a, 24). In combining the rules of both languages with her
own personal voice, she is free from the restrictions and conventions of her
own culture. Guo says that the writing of a dictionary came quite naturally;
the format of the dictionary and the broken English all conspire to create the
narrative and its characters:
When I came here 5 years ago, everything was very exciting and very fresh but I
think my identity . . . the first six months I was just automatically collecting all the
funny phenomenas I met in my daily life, all the vocabularies and I thought that
should be the base for my new book . . . and one day I decide that broken English
should be the force of that novel I spent another year just to write the first 20
pages . . . for a Chinese person we don’t have present tense, so we speak in present
tense, when we need to use tense we need to add time first in the sentence . . . so
what I need to find is that broken English has its own system which is Chinese
system but being expressed in English . . . so what I did was use present tense or
-ing but I need to make them more understandable and very short sentences . . . as
novel goes on I use more complex sentences, and the character understands
more . . . the difference between I or me and she does and I do . . . that’s the kind of
verb change . . . and that you do need to pay great attention on linguistic side
rather than the storytelling side. (Guo 2007b)
In the creation of this interstitial language, there is a degree of alienation from

both English and Chinese; Guo comes to feel like a lonely translator. She
expresses this alienation by comparing her language to Nushu, a women-only
language used in China until its last user died in 2005. She reads the headline
of a new article about Nushu: “Lost for words—the Language of An Endan-
gered Species.” The narrator says, “It is a story about ninety-eight-year old
Chinese woman just died. She is the last speaker of womans-only language:
‘Nushu.’ This four-hundred year old secret language being used by Chinese
womans to express theys innermost feeling. The paper say because no wom-
ans practice that secret codes anymore, it marks that language died after her
death” (Guo 2007a, 122). She continues, “I want create my own ‘Nushu.’ Maybe
this notebook which I use for putting new English vocabularies is a Nushu.’
Then I have my own privacy. You know my body, my everyday’s life, but you
not know my ‘Nushu’” (122). Whether a code, a secret language, or incoherent
self-reflexive language, her language still resonates with Chinese cadences,
phrases, and imagery. Her strange, fragmented English—a kind of hybrid
English—is political and forceful with the assertion of her identity. At times
her language resists the cultural correctness that she intuitively knows she
does not possess:
In my language school, Mrs Margaret ask me:

“Would you like some tea?”
“No,” I say.
She looking at me, her face suddenly frozen. Then she asking me again:
“Would you like some coffee then?”
“No, I don’t want.”
“Are you sure you don’t want anything?”
“No, I don’t want anything wet,” I saying loudly, precisely.
Mrs. Margaret looking very upset.
But why she asking me again and again? I already answer her from first time.
Oh dear. Mrs Margaret sigh heavy. Then she standing up and starting
make her own tea. She drink it in very thirsty way, like angry camel in desert.
(Guo 2007a, 36)
The narrator’s conclusion from several such experiences is, “China not have
politeness in same way” (Guo 2007a, 3). To communicate she persists in
asking questions that in Chinese culture could be evidence of care and con-
cern but do not translate well when reproduced in English:
I asking the rude questions . . .

“Excuse me, you know there are some red spots on your face?”
“Are you a bit fatter than me?”
“I don’t believe we same age. You look much older than me.”
“I think you are a very normal person. Not a special person.”
“The food you cook is disgusting. Why nobody tell you?” (Guo 2007a, 37)
The series of bad responses and cues she receives in response to these ques-
tions leads her to criticize English. To defend her language, she instinctually
returns to the rules of her culture when she is disoriented. She points out how
English’s tonal flatness provides no clue as to meaning:
“B-e-e-c-h, not b-e-a-c-h. In English, a beech is a type of tree, not an ocean. I’ll
take you to the sea another time.”
How I ever understand your complicated language—not even any change
in accent like we have in Chinese. We have four intonations so every tone
means different word. Like:
mı៮ in first tone means to close eyes.
mí in second tone means to fancy something.
mı̆ in third tone means rice.
mì in fourth tone means honey. (Guo 2007a, 110)
In another exchange with her lover, she offers a view on his lassitude and
fatigue. His incredulity brings out more cultural difference and alienation:
“I guess Trauma causes Qi and blood to leave the normal currents of flow. And
it causes the stagnation of your inner energy. So parts of your body will be
suffered from the lack of Qi. That’s why you get tired everyday easily. And that’s
why you get headache regularly.”
“How do you know all this?” You stare at me.
“Because I am a Chinese.”
“You mean all Chinese people know about this?”
“I think so.”
“Are you serious? Even the ones who work in the Chinese takeaway on
Hackney Road?”
“You can ask them, next time when we pass by, I say.”
“You know, you never really tell me things like this.” Now you get up from
the bed. You must feel better.
But you never really ask me. You never really pay attention to my culture.
You English once took over Hong Kong, so you probably heard of that we
Chinese have 5,000 years of the greatest human civilization ever existed in the
world. . . . Our Chinese invented paper so your Shakespeare can write two
thousand years later. Our Chinese invented gunpowder for you English and
the Americans to bomb Iraq. And our Chinese invented compass for you
English to sail and colonize the Asian and Africa. (Guo 2007a, 289)
Gradually the narrator and her lover discover that the problems of lan-
guage contribute to the inevitable emotional divide that separates them.
Guo states that the linguistic battle between the two provides the force for
the novel, and their cultural battles that engage sexuality, customs, and
politeness push the characters apart and spawn a decline narrative for
their relationship. A dictionary could not save this relationship, as the
problem ceases to be translation but a battle over authorship—who au-
thors their relationship and their conversation? As the narrator loses her
ability to navigate the relationship and her lover loses command over the
narrative of their relationship, they are unable to express their own iden-
tities and roles despite the narrator’s improved English. The narrative’s
irony is particularly poignant because the narrator’s voice and story gain
depth and force as her relationship falters:
The central character, one is Chinese quite naive Chinese young woman and
another one is kind of tired of western civilization, a kind of hippie character
from England. I think in front of this relationship you see this cultural differ-
ence but I think I need to find a way, a device, to talk about this difference of
their cultural background, so the language is the first thing I need to figure out.
So the man speaks English and the woman speaks Chinese or a Chinese kind of
English, and behind that is each other’s history and their understanding of
their culture, for me the language is a central character between the man and
the woman and the language is actual a force character for the whole book.
So these two characters have fight, language itself is a war, is a battle between
them, is a identity battle between them.
The reason why I want to make them almost nameless, anonymous is
actually they are one person, they represent one person’s two side, two per-
sonality. I think sometimes they exchange their identity. During the book in
the middle part of the book the woman learn so many vocabularies and the
woman learn so much English she take over his language, and the man kind of
lost his language, so the man becames speechless in the latter part of the book;
it’s about how a person try to gain their language also at the same time losing
their ability to express to their society. (Guo 2007b)
As time passes, the narrator’s lover realizes that he exists in an incoherent

narrative with his lover, and that he had not labored to develop the same
hybrid approach to their relationship that she had. Thus her language
remained hers, rather than a shared cultural phenomenon. His lack of
ability to express his own narrative at the end of the novel demonstrates
his own self-inscribed limitations. While the narrator has energetically
absorbed English culture, his hybrid vocabulary is nonexistent. His
speechlessness and her inability to bridge the gap despite language acqui-
sition show his failure to help generate their conversation and subse-
quently their narrative.
Guo’s book is chronological, taking place over the course of one year,
from February to February. As the months progress, the narrator’s lan-
guage incorporates fewer concrete objects and becomes more conceptual.
Her language progression develops logically from basic to more special-
ized words, to slang, and finally to concepts. This can be seen from the
chapter headings:
Prologue
February. alien, hostel, full English breakfast, fog, properly, beginner,
pronoun, slogan, weather, confusion, homesick, progressive tenses
March. homosexual, guest, misunderstanding, bachelor, green fingers,
fertilise, instruction, charm, vegetarian, noble
April. surprise, pub, drifter, bisexual, Chinese cabbage + English slug,
privacy, freeworld
May. custom, fart, home, colony
June. prostitute, heaven, romance
July. physical work, isolate, humor, migraine
August. equal, frustration, nonsense, identity, anarchist, hero, freedom,
Schengen space
September. Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Venice, Tavira, Faro, Dublin
October. self, abortion, nostalgia, age
November. pathology, pessimism/optimism, electric, bestseller
December. future tense, possess
January. betray, infinity, expel, dilemma, timing
February. contradiction, fatalism, race, departure
Afterwards
Such a progression also means narrative progression, as the narrator’s de-

scription of cultural differences on a conceptual level results in writing that is
more sophisticated than her earlier passages indicate. For example,
Infinity. When I was in the primary school, the mathematics teacher taught us
to count until we were too tired to count anymore. The teacher said that the
last number is “infinity.” It is a number but numberless. One can count and
count until the numbers become uncountable.
Infinity, is an uncountable future.
Here in our kitchen and bedroom our battle is an infinity. (Guo 2007a, 318)
In using the concept of infinity to apply to her relationship, she expresses her
disappointment in her partner’s ability to commit because he wants to live in
the present, not the future. Her assessment of their inability to reconcile is
rooted in her mind in cultural difference:
OK, from now on we don’t talk about future. All I know is: our Chinese live in the
expectation. Expectation, is that the word close to Future? The farmers grow their
rice in the spring, and they water it and expect it grow every day. The rice sprouts
turn into green and the rice pole grow up taller. Then summer comes and the
farmers look forward to grain growing bigger. Then the autumn harvest, and the
grain becomes golden. Their expectation is nearly fulfilled, but not complete. After
the harvest they separate the straw and millet. The straw goes to the shepherd’s
pens or the pig’s yard, and the millet goes to the market for sale. All this is so that a
family can have better life in the winter and in the coming Spring Festival. In the
winter they burn the roots and grass on the fields to nourish the soil for next year’s
re-plant. Everything is for the next step. So look this nature, life is about the
expectation, but not about now, not about today, or tonight. So you can’t only live
in today, that will be the doom day. (Guo 2007a, 320)
Or in another example, toward the end of the book, she is living out the clash
of rules between cultures and ponders the word “expel”:
expel. Today, my government work unit calls me. Suddenly, I am dragged back
to that society. The officer in the phone say seriously, in the communist way,
“You have a contract with us. We have to warn you to come back before you do
wrong things there. Don’t break our rules. Return back in one month accord-
ing to the rule in our work unit, otherwise you will be Kai chu (expelled) from
our organization.”
Kai Chu!
Expelled!
. . . They always threaten the little people, in the name of the whole nation.
And you don’t have a chance against it. It is like Mao’s little red book, it is
written in the imperative tone.” (Guo 2007a, 322)
Figure 8. http://en.visionunion.com/2009/11/09/show-of-5th-foundertype-chinese-type-design-
competition.html. As shown here fonts can be toyed with to such an extent that a character can
be transformed into an icon. This Chinese icon hybrid language provides a design analogy to
hybrid Chinglish.
In her narrative, Guo’s striving for linguistic understanding requires her self-
contortion and ingenuity. The vernacular she is using—the rule breaking that
leads to a broken English—results in innovative, experimental uses of language,
diction, style, and content, whether intentionally or not. She moves outside the
laws of English that create new versions of the language. It is this movement that
results in linguistic anarchy but also reinvention (see Figure 8).
While Xu Bing’s project is groundbreaking and revealing in presenting
iconography as a more malleable substitute for communication than writing,
he raises questions about whether icons can adequately serve to represent
cultural worlds. Cultural richness and cultural locality are linked, and thus it
is uncertain that a universal iconography can make everyone feel linguisti-
cally free. Using both perspectives of Xu Bing and Xiaolu Guo, it is evident that
linguistic expression requires evolution to reach greater levels of intelligibil-
ity. While the format of that expression is still hypothetical, Chinglish and
icons formed into designs by human hands appear to accommodate the
desire for individual expression more than computer-generated iconography.
Xu Bing raises the bar for translation activity by pursuing the possibility of a
universally intelligible system, while Xiaolu Guo narrates the human limits for
ultimate intelligibility and demands that the voyage of the lonely translator be
acknowledged and validated.
NOTES
1. Some systems that use icons focus on reworking existent writing systems in order to
produce one that is more efficient, such as the one noted in John Quijada’s “Ithkuil: A
Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language,” which condenses some thoughts of
several words into one word.
2. An interesting map of Internet density can be found here: http://chrisharrison.net/projects/
InternetMap/index.html (accessed March 25, 2011).
3. Interview with Evelyn Ch’ien, e-mail January 25, 2012.
4. Choosing monolingual Chinese dictionaries also requires a bit of research in terms of
format. Graphics, semantics, phonetics, and functional classifications govern the choices.
Graphics organization descended from the almost-oldest Chinese dictionary, the shuowen
jiezi (說文解字, “Explaining Simple and Analyzing Compound Characters,” 100–121 CE)
that delineated a system of 540 bushou (部首, “section header”) under which characters
could be grouped. Those bushou were later simplified to 214 radicals, which exist today and
have given most dictionaries their modus operandi of being organized by stroke number
and radicals (parts of characters). For semantic arrangement, the circa third-century BCE
Erya (爾雅, “Approaching Correctness”) is the oldest extant Chinese dictionary, and schol-
arship reveals that it is a pre-Qin compilation of glosses to classical texts. It contains lists of
synonyms arranged into 19 semantic categories (e.g., “Explaining Plants,” “Explaining
Trees”). The Han Dynasty dictionary xiao erya (小爾雅, “Little Erya”) reduces these 19 to 13
chapters. For phonetic arrangement, today’s pinyin and tones form the backbone of the
dictionary structure, descended from the rime dictionary.
5. This series of exchanges about how to transliterate sounds from English to Chinese is an
amusing read and gives a taste of complications that can arise in transliteration: http://
www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/5837-a-linguistic-hybrid-naming-roman-letters-
in-chinese/.
6. A beginner using a traditionally graphically organized Chinese-English dictionary would
find the designated radical in a character—usually a part of the character that indicates
sound or meaning. Dictionaries usually have a comprehensive list of radicals. In terms of
radicals providing meaning, one example is the “water” radical—three sweeping marks
usually on the left side of a character—which is a part found in the water-containing
characters for “soup” (汤) and “sweat” (汗). Radicals are listed by stroke number starting
with h (yi, the character for one), so once the radical of a character is found it is necessary
to count the strokes of the radical, for example, four for 木, and then of the character in
which it appears, for example, eight for 林. Then is it necessary to find the character under
the radical that categorizes it. Another set of pages correlating radicals with the characters
based on them is in every dictionary as well. Upon finding the character, next to it will be
listed its reference number in the dictionary.
7. I saw the first version of this dictionary in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1996 while discussing
the topic with Rick Harbaugh (his parents were my landlords).
REFERENCES
Bing, Xu. 2006. Book from the Ground. Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Guo, Xiaolu. 2007a. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. London: Vintage.
. 2007b. Interview with Rick Kleffel. http://trashotron.com/agony/audio/guo_xiaolu_
2007.mp3 (accessed January 23, 2012).
Shih-Chu, Liang, ed. 1992. Far East Chinese-English Dictionary. Taipei: Far East Book Company.

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Reinventing Translation: Icons and Dictionaries

Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien

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Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien

THE DICTIONARY HAS CONSISTENTLY BEEN VIEWED FUNDAMENTAL TO

Figure 1. My drawing is of Katsuichi Ito’s playful representation of Chinese characters. Ito

icons is accustomed to viewing writing units as characters rather than

rendered an obsolete phenomenon; the human body is rendered irrelevant. In

know as writing. He felt compelled to write a manifesto to provide the raison

Chinese ideography was undoubtedly superior to Amerindian pictography

Though Kircher’s understanding of Chinese was erroneous, he identified

Numeric commands can now be represented as icons, thus turning a special-

When icons are manipulated outside of technology and arranged or drawn by

Figure 4. Traffic jam sketch (2005). Courtesy Xu Bing studio.

Figure 5. Landscript (2009). Courtesy Xu Bing studio.

Figure 6. Landscript (2009). Courtesy Xu Bing studio.

by a computer cannot replace human nuance. Iconography and any rollout

Your language is your country.

system used alongside kanji, or characters that originated from Chinese.

As implied earlier, translations often produce a by-product median language,

language to another. In cases discussed earlier, editors of bicultural diction-

By moving between two languages as an author, and playing on the con-

In the creation of this interstitial language, there is a degree of alienation from

In my language school, Mrs Margaret ask me:

I asking the rude questions . . .

As time passes, the narrator’s lover realizes that he exists in an incoherent

Such a progression also means narrative progression, as the narrator’s de-

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