So there is indeed some speculation about shady judging going around in figure skating, and it even involves a Chinese judge

Amusingly, the speculation is that China and the US struck a deal. US supports Sui/Han, China supports Nathan Chen and pushes down the Russians Background: the Team event gold is going to be decided between the US and Russia, with Russia being favored. In order to win, the US needs to see the Russian team being pushed down as much as possible

You know, nobody with a brain should think the fact that a Uyghur athlete lit the cauldron disproves the existence of systematic oppression of Uyghurs, any more than a black American doing anything disproves the existence of systematic oppression of black people in America

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1489612233692831748

So why the need for linguistic contortions to avoid acknowledging Yilamujiang's ethnicity? Is it because you're trying to sell such a cartoonish image of that systematic oppression that the mere existence of a Uyghur in Chinese public life threatens to disprove it?

most of the sports nationalism I've personally run across on Chinese social media this olympics is much more anti-American than it is anti-Japanese. granted, there are some sport-specific reasons for this and ymmv depending on what sports you follow but the bulk of the vitriol I've seen has been directed at Chinese-Americans who are perceived as being anti-China, meanwhile I haven't really seen even the less beloved JPN athletes catch much flak. Also seen some anti-Russia sentiment but I think that's entirely sport specific

interestingly, quite a bit of chinese and japanese olympics coverage seems to, if anything, be aimed at mutual soft power gains

https://twitter.com/chinahand/status/1489414544560508932

okay granted my perception of the Chinese/Japanese coverage is almost certainly highly skewed by the fact that I'm a huge fan of Yuzuru Hanyu, who is honestly such an excellent human being in every respect that it almost can't be helped

ngl the weird, exoticizing way certain kinds of western china watchers insisted on using "guanxi" instead of translating it as relationships/whatever contextually appropriate word single-handedly put me in the "avoid transliteration as much as possible" camp for a while

https://twitter.com/bokane/status/1489462746647343104

the way these kinds of people talk about guanxi makes it sound like Chinese people are some kind of aliens that don't have normal human relationships, and the insistence on transliterating the term instead of translating it was definitely a key enabler of that

Off the top of my head, I can name a number of athletes who are competing or have competed for a different country than the one they were born in just in the one Olympic sport I follow. Political commentators, get a grip Tim Koleto (USA -> Japan)
Ekaterina Kurakova (Russia -> Poland)
Anastasia Gubanova (Russia -> Georgia)
Yi Zhu (USA -> China)
Keegan Messing (USA -> Canada)
Alexia Paganini (USA -> Switzerland)
Morisi Kvitelashvili (Russia -> Georgia)

the more time I spend translating these video game regulations the more I become convinced that the People’s Republic of China is indeed a true inheritor of Plato Here, I can prove it:
Premise 1: All of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato
Premise 2: Marx is part of Western philosophy
Conclusion 1: Marx is a footnote to Plato

I am no where near enough of a weeb to be able to translate the video game censorship regs without having to look a bunch of shit up😩 china is oppressing weebs

more offbeat stuff to keep myself sane: censors are not a fan of gamers turning Japanese Imperial warships into waifus

(also not fans of Onmyoji, Naruto, or Arknights, apparently) 'The market share of 2D games like Onmyoji, Naruto, Arknights, etc. is relatively high. They trivialize history, to the point that there are gamers who, having become fans of the games, post flying comments on documentaries shouting “Kaga is my wife!”'

Okay, on to the other bit of controversial and pop-culturally relevant regulation, banning male character designs that are too feminized. Here's the original+translation

Main take away: the standard is that the censor can't clearly tell the character's intended gender Venti and Gorou from Genshin Impact are used as examples of feminized character designs. It's not entirely clear to me whether the comment about most of male characters in Genshin Impact being feminized means that most fail to pass the standard they set

I'm kind of worried that people may misinterpret this due to not being able to read Chinese, so I decided to prioritize translating it

Apologies in advance if there are any errors--I'm not super familiar with Chinese video game terminology and I'm running on very little sleep 😭

https://twitter.com/fanyiyi33/status/1443818498732412932

In case people aren't aware, this is from a video game industry conference where someone who's working as a censor gave a talk about the video game regulations. Therefore, as you can see, the content pertains primarily to video games, and also has a notes-like structure

me trying to translate the whole 13 page document about video game regs because it’s relevant to anyone interested in c-ent in general: 😵‍💫 this is going to take forever

so much more tedious and annoying than translating fiction no promises, it’s a lot of work and I don’t know how much time I want to devote to this

On a lighter note, still not over this line from the semi-official? memo on video game regs going around

“In Civilization 6, players are rewarded for exterminating ‘barbarians.’ In fact, this is an amoral, colonialist mentality.” I mean, can’t say they don’t have a point

the CCP is woke after all 😂

could the Chinese government not try to strangle its own culture industry please

https://twitter.com/therealjoshye/status/1443241128300408837

some of these regs are ridiculous, and even if censors aren’t as strict as people think they might be, most companies aren’t going to want to risk it so will self-censor anyway

I feel like the vast majority of Westerners haven't really grappled with the fact that they benefit enormously from the oppressive actions of their ancestors, and that yelling at non-western countries not to do the very same oppressive things they did without changing the structural realities that lead to those oppressive behaviors in the first place is going to look not like any kind of principled commitment to human rights, but rather as kicking away the ladder. It's also not going to be effective

One concept that exists in translation studies is the idea of domesticating versus foreignizing translation strategies, or in other words, the extent to which you want to adapt the translation to the culture of the target language, vs deliberately highlighting the cultural 1/ gap between the source text and the speakers of the target language. Interestingly, fan communities moderately to strongly prefer foreignization strategies, whereas professional translation leans towards domestication. Some people seem to think one is better than the other, 2/