China’s Arthur C. Clarke

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/chinas-arthur-c-clarke?intcid=mod-latest

by kercker • 11 years ago

57 13 11 years ago

The language/alphabet barrier, as well as the censorship barrier, prevent us from knowing China's Clarke, China's Feynman, China's Tesla maybe.

And we've come to reflexively discount anything coming out of China as derivative.

Don't forget - China is almost 25% of the human race!

What might we in the West be missing out on?

bane• 11 years ago

I remember it being not all that long ago, as China (and greater Asia) ramped up on the internet, that the West was deeply concerned about the mono-lingual Asians not being able to take advantage of all the wisdom, science and art the West had produced.

In some ways this is true, in some ways it's self-enforced, and in some ways the reverse is true as well.

Automatic machine translation, and query expansion was supposed to make these inter-lingual barriers go away. But it feels like in many ways, the effort has died. Sure you can still go to translate.google.com and put in a URL and get a reasonable translated page back for a large number of languages. But I can't go to google.com and put in a query for refrigerator and it brings back matches for 冰箱 or 电冰箱 and translates those automagically. That next step just never seemed to happen, and what were fast advances in East Asian language machine translation just seems to have died out (Korean/Japanese <-> English is virtually unusable).

Even within like-language groups, ones that have "good enough" translations, this next step didn't happen. If I want to search for réfrigérateur I still have to translate the word myself, then go back to google.com, paste the word in and then hit "translate page" next to the search results (and hope that chrome's automatic translation kicks in on the search results so I have some idea what I'm clicking).

paublyrne• 11 years ago

Yes. We will all have to become a lot more multi-lingual instead. A large amount of secondary students here now choose Chinese over French, German, or Spanish.

It's easy to be 'lazy' as a native English speaker.

davmre• 11 years ago

Automatic machine translation, and query expansion was supposed to make these inter-lingual barriers go away. But it feels like in many ways, the effort has died.

Machine translation is still very much an active area of research. It sucked for many years as people hand-crafted more and more complicated systems; the big breakthroughs of the past ten years or so have come from realizing that, given very large (internet-scale) training datasets, you can apply some simple statistical methods and do much better than the previous hard-coded methods that couldn't exploit this wealth of data. There's been lots of tuning of the shallow statistical approach, but my understanding is that significant further progress will involve models that capture a deeper understanding of semantics while still maintaining the ability to be trained from large datasets. Identifying such models is hard and is an active area of research. Neural networks have been receiving a lot of study recently as one possible approach (see e.g. this demo http://104.131.78.120/ from Yoshua Bengio's lab), but there are other avenues as well.

Basically I don't think it's accurate to say "the effort has died". Research takes time, the technology is improving, and it's quite possible that within another ten or fifteen years we'll be able do to the sort of seamless, accurate translation across the Internet that you'd like to see. (translation between European languages, which are fundamentally similar in many ways, is already close to that point, but bridging the gap to Asian languages has been much harder...)

wodenokoto• 11 years ago

How does the censorship barrier block art and science from getting OUT of China?

huxley• 11 years ago

True enough, I love reading Chinese literature (in English translation because my Chinese is extremely basic) especially loved Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" or Mo Yan's stuff like "Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh".

But I hadn't really followed any manhua (Chinese manga/comics) until by pure luck I stumbled across a series by Xià Dá (夏达), she's created a really great manhua called 長歌行 or Cháng Gē Xíng (in Japanese Chouka Kou; in English sometimes called Song of the Long March). Her art style reminds me of Takehiko Inoue's Vagabond, her writing and characterization are smart and well-developed.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17788476-1-chang-ge-xing-...

girzel• 11 years ago

The censorship barrier doesn't prevent Chinese art from getting out of China, it prevents Chinese art from being particularly good in the first place.

The first volume of The Three Body Problem is looking like the most successful work of Chinese fiction in English translation for the past thirty years (and that includes the books of a certain Nobel prize-winner). I chalk that up largely to the fact that it is science fiction: sci-fi fans know that the book is ultimately going to fit a familiar mold. The China-specific stuff is just special sauce, something unusual and interesting. Readers are still confident that they'll get aliens and physics and interstellar war, and they aren't disappointed. By the time they reach the third volume, and the story starts to fly off the handle, they may be disappointed.

Chinese literary fiction leaves readers confused from the start. It's often messily written, over-ambitious, blunt-toothed, and doesn't read well in English. Some of that is attributable to a general disregard of writing-as-craft in China, some of it to poor English translations, but much of it to political pressure.

fa• 11 years ago

Bought this book, “The Three-Body Problem”!

housel• 11 years ago

I've just started reading The Three Body Problem (in a Traditional Chinese edition, since I'm more comfortable with that than Simplified). No spoilers please.

From my perspective, what little I've read of Chinese speculative fiction (such as a couple of Ni Kuang novels) seems to take a bit of what I call a "golly gee whiz" tone, making a big deal about ideas that would be old hat to most readers of Western SF. What I've read so far of Liu Cixin seems to have a bit of this, but perhaps not as bad; I'll see how I feel after I finish the trilogy.

crazychrome2• 11 years ago

I stopped reading Ni Kuang's work since 14. I'd consider comparing Ni Kuang with Liu a serious offence to Liu's readers.

In my opinion, the second and third instalments of The Three Body Problem are as good as the Foundation series. The first one, really is just a trailer.

The second one, entitled The Dark Forest is far more than Sci-fi. Personally, I interpret it as a serious international political question: could the West really tolerate any other forms of civilisation? the book gave a negative perspective.

Claim: I live in UK and I understand most of EU folks don't like to be simplified as Westerners. However, from a Chinese perspective, the cultural differences between FR/DE/UK/CA/US/AU are invisible.

crazychrome2• 11 years ago

I think Liu is more inline with Isaac Asimov than Arthur Clarke. Liu is clearly an atheist and intentionally avoid cheap reading gratification achieved by science-religion association.

My complaint about Liu: he has a silly admiration towards Stephen Hawking probably due to his obsession with black hole. (but who doesn't?) 200 years later, people might only get to know Stephen Hawking when reading Liu's books.

m0skit0• 11 years ago

Looks like worth reading, although the themes of the novels covered in the article look pretty much rehashed from other authors like Arthur C. Clarke of course, but also Larry Niven comes to mind.

rasz_pl• 11 years ago

Reminds me of the wast difference in style, topics and tone between western and Eastern Bloc SCiFi writers.

I wonder if Chinese authors also try to criticise regime and socio-political system they live in under the veil of scifi, like Janusz Zajdel in Poland during Russian occupation.

China’s Arthur C. Clarke

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