Okay, good afternoon, so welcome to the last but least session of our SOA Centre of Tyrol Studies seminar. Last but least. Yeah. Last but least. I'm delighted to welcome back Daryl Sturrock from Hong Kong's Linen University. We've heard him give the one talk already on Tyrolie's indigenous film. He's also spoken last year. So we're great fans of Dujou's academic work but also his translation. Just, I think it was yesterday, one of our CTF fans asked us to pass on how much they enjoyed his translation of Rumi's stolen article. And of course with a number of the books that he's translated have been launched at SOA's. For example, Horace Hurst, Fordham, Karnatian Lane and Chuchon Yu's wedding in autumn. And on his previous visit he also talked about his experience of translation. And one of the things that he's as enthusiastic about his translation as his work on film. And it kind of reminded me about why I wasn't suitable to be a translation. I remember when I graduated from university I went to a translation agency in Tyvek. And very quickly I realised this wasn't the thing for me. Because of that attention to detail. And that's one of the things that really came through in his earlier talks on his translation experience and passion. But really that kind of minute detail. And so on that note we're going to have another translation themed talk. But quite a different one. This time it's going to be on film. So let's give Darrell a very big welcome. Thanks Davos for the introduction and for having me here. It's an honour. Thanks to Jia Yuan for the printouts and for making everything possible. We're all impressed with your attention to detail. And thanks to all of you. It's been a long week. Do my best to tell you about a research project I've been working on for the past four years. It's become kind of an obsession. It may be a lifelong obsession. You can imagine that I might have a lot to say about it. But I'm going to try to keep it as short as possible. So the title of my talk is the translation of Saedek Balai. Saedek Balai into Saedek as interpretation. So who has seen Saedek Balai? Who has seen this movie? If you haven't seen the movie, please put up your hand. If you haven't heard about the movie, please put up your hand. Everyone has heard of the movie? That's good. Have you heard of the Ushan incident? Ushaji Ken in Japanese? The Ushan incident? Okay, great. So some things I don't have to say because you know it already. That's always good to know. So we'll start with the title of the film. In Chinese, it's Saedek Balai. And that's a transliteration of a phrase in a language called Saedek. The language is called Saedek. How many syllables are there in the word Saedek? Saedek? Three syllables. I'm overemphasizing the final. Which is the stressed syllable, the main stress in the word? There's one main stress in every word in the language, Saedek. Why give a new body language to the second syllable, the penultimate syllable. The second last syllable is always stressed. All other syllables are unstressed. What sound is the Q? Is it a Q in English? No. What does Q mean in the International Phonetic Alphabet, if anyone knows? I'll demonstrate again. Saedek, you have to open your mouth wide and make a kind of K or G sound. But it's not made in the same place that a K or G sound is made. It's made with your yuvila. How many of you know what a yuvila is? You all have a yuvila. Chao shou tou.  But this language does.  Saedek, it's not a K. But it sounds like a K if you're not used to it. And this word, Saedek, means person originally. Person or people. It can be singular or plural. And as I mentioned, it's extended in meaning. It also means the language that these people speak. And it's become an ethnonym. An ethnonym is a word for an ethnic group. So in the Japanese era already, it had come to mean the people that speak this language and practice a certain kind of culture. You can call the culture Saedek as well. Is that clear? And then Bale is Bale, a penultimate stress, meaning the first syllable is stressed. Two syllables in the word. And it's an adverb or an adjective meaning real, really true or truly. So real person is basically what the title of the movie means. Real person is an odd collocation that people don't say real person very much.   Nobody would say such a thing. We can say a real man, that works. And a real woman, can you say she's a real woman? Sounds a little bit wrong. But the closest you can get is kind of real man. And in their culture a real man was somebody that had completed requirements for adulthood and originally that meant headhunting. And they still use the term today. They don't still headhunt today. That means to become an adult is changed. Women could also become real people. They had to learn how to weave clothing to close the members of the village community. Okay, so hopefully partly this will be educational and not just about my research. My research in a word is the translation of the screenplay for the film into this language. The film is about the Usha incident, and the Usha incident took place in Japanese and Saeda. But at the time, nobody was around to record what people said. And all of the historical materials we have are in Japanese. And so based on these historical materials, a director called Leda Sun, wrote a screenplay in the 1990s called Slade Kebalai. But the screenplay was in Mandarin because he can't speak Japanese or this language. So the film depends on translation. He had to have the screenplay translated into Japanese and Saeda, or he wouldn't have been able to shoot the kind of movie he wanted, a movie mostly in the original language. It's actually entirely in the original languages. One of the interesting things about the movie is that the screenplays in Mandarin, but there's not a single word of Mandarin in the movie. It's all translated in this language. So my argument basically is that the translation is not a carbon copy of the Mandarin original screenplay. It's different in really interesting ways. And that we can describe the translation as an interpretation by the translators. The translators were obviously speakers of Saeda. An interpretation by the translators of the Usha incident and of their own culture. So it's an interpretation of the Usha incident in terms of their own culture and it's also an interpretation of their own culture. That's basically it. So the film is based on the Usha incident, and I think everyone has heard of it. So this will just be a little bit of a review on October 27th, October 1930. Degadaya Seedek, Chief Monerudo, led the warriors of six villages in an attack against the Japanese at the hill station of Usha in central Taiwan. Today it's called Usha in Mandarin. Now I use hill station. Hill station we normally use in India. So why did the British build hill stations in India? Because it's really hot in the summer. They wanted to go up the mountains to escape the heat, and it's also a way to extract natural resources. So the Japanese motivation to build Usha was about the same. And one of the main natural resources they wanted to extract was wood, and they needed a lot of wood to build infrastructure at Usha to turn it into a hill station. And so who was going to cut down these trees and haul them to Usha? Would the Japanese be doing this work? No, it's too hard. And there weren't enough Japanese people in the area. So they got local indigenous people. They got the Seedek to log and carry the wood to Usha so that they could lumber it into boards and then build buildings in Usha. Post offices, police stations and schools. One of the problems was that it was corrugated labor, so it was forced labor. They forced them to do the labor, and they were supposed to pay them, but they didn't pay them very much, and it didn't pay them at all. So that was one problem. The other problem was that these people kind of believed that they are descended from a tree called the Pusa Kahoni. Pusa Kahoni is a tree. It's half rock, half tree, or half tree, half rock. It's unclear exactly what the nature of this origin is, but the word kahoni is tree. So they believed they were descended from a tree. It's like a totem ancestor. And now they have to cut down trees in the forest and haul them to Usha and not get paid for it. If it were you, you had to do this work. I don't think you'd be very happy about it. And I think what eventually has to happen, they say enough is enough. And so that's what happened on October 27th. They attacked an assembly of Japanese people at a sports day for three schools in the area, and they killed 134 people. So what's going to happen then? The native population have attacked an assembly of colonizers. We've got to punish them. And so the Japanese punish them. And one of the ways that if you're a colonizing power, one of the ways to rule the colonized is by dividing the colonial population and getting some of them to help you. Collaborators, you have to find some collaborators. And so in this case, they hired Doda Siddik, Doda Siddik people as mercenaries and got them to headhunt the Dugodaya Siddik. And you'll notice a similarity in this word. And that word, Siddik, at the top, Dugodaya Siddik, and this word, Siddik. This word is stressed, the last syllable, Siddik. It's only got two syllables. And then Doda is another sub-ethnic group. If Siddik is an ethnic group, then Dugodaya is a sub-ethnic group and Doda is another sub-ethnic group. And today it's analyzed into three sub-ethnic groups and three dialects, Dugodaya, Doda, and Truku. But all you have to know to appreciate the movie is Dugodaya and Doda. Is that clear? Okay. And that is basically what the film covers. That's what the film is about. And this is kind of the aftermath. The survivors of the Japanese reprisal were placed in shelters where they were attacked again by the Doda Siddik in the second Wusha incident. And the survivors of this second attack were moved in 1931 to a village north of Puli called Luba. And that's what the local people called it. And in Japanese, we can say in Mandarin, as tronzhongdao. And then afterwards, been renamed again in Qingyu. And then Dugodaya land was given to the Doda as a reward for their service to the emperor as a service for the Japanese. Any questions? Is that pretty clear? Okay. So, I already mentioned that there's not a single line of Mandarin in the film, even though the screenplay is entirely in Mandarin. It was translated into Japanese and Saedic during pre-production in 2009. And so in this presentation, I discussed the translation into Saedic by a team of translators led by Daki Kawa, who served as Onset Language Consultant. Onset Saedic Language Consultant. Because the actors they hired for this movie were not native speakers of Saedic, imagine. I speak English, and they want to make a movie in Dutch. But they can't find any Dutch speakers, and so they hire me, and they get me to deliver my lines in Dutch. To make it seem historically authentic. That's the kind of situation they have here. I'll discuss examples of intentional translational shifts. A translational shift is basically a mistranslation. It's when you say the translation is unexpected. It doesn't seem very close to the original. It seems like the translator has done something. The translator has been irresponsible. But any time you notice a translation shift in a translation you're reading, you should keep in mind that the translator is responsible, not just to the original text, but to many other people and many other things. And I'll describe these translation shifts as being part of an interpretation of the incident, as I said. And this interpretation was founded on their understanding of Saedic culture, which may or may not be entirely accurate. They were translating the screenplay 80 years after the incident took place. So their understanding of it and their understanding, even of their own traditional culture, 80 years later, is limited. My emphasis on understanding contributes to the study of translation to endangered languages in terms of cultural translation. I'll come back to that at the end. Okay.  And he sees wearing the earphones and the parka, because he's on set during the filming of the film. And he's listening to the audio. He's listening to the lines and the actors have delivered and decided whether it's good enough. And if it wasn't good enough, he had the right to ask the actors to do the scene again, which is to say he had the right to ask the director to re-shoot a scene if it wasn't up to his standards. And you can imagine this would be kind of troublesome for the director. And it would also make filming much more expensive. And they didn't have very much money at a certain point, and I think they told him, listen, no, it's good enough. It's good enough. For 99.99% of the audience who does not speak seidek, it's good enough. It's good enough. Okay. But Daki Sabao did not think he was good enough. And so after he did a draft of the translation, he asked two other two of his colleagues. One is Baowanaoi. You see, he's dressed up in traditional attire. He is Zaro Cho-Sum. In Mandarin, he played a character in the movie. He played the father of Monorudo, the chief that launched the attack on the Japanese. Rudo Luhei is his name in the movie. And then I'm betting it's my friend. It's kind of the reason I'm here today. She was so kind as to reply to my email in 2011, asking a silly question about seidek ballet and what their notion of that is today. So these three people were together on the Dugudaya seidek translation. Remember, just now in my explanation, I emphasize that there are two subethnic groups or two dialects into which the film was translated. And these two guys were responsible for the Doda seidek lines. Mostly the film was in Dugudaya, but about 10 or 15% was in Doda. And so I think it's really nice because in 1930, in 1931, they were killing each other. They were attacking the Japanese or attacking each other. They were at each other's posts. Their grandparents were trying to kill each other. And then 80 years later, they're working together. So I find it very moving, and that's part of the reason I've been doing this research for three years now, four years now. Okay, so what kind of translation shifts do we see when we compare the Mandarin original to the seidek translation? Here's an example. So in Mandarin, the most famous line from the film in English it means but my determination to resist the Japanese is firmer or more solid than Mount Chilai. Mount Chilai is the biggest mountain, the tallest mountain in the vicinity. It's about 10, 15 kilometers away from Ushua, and it's 3,700 or so meters tall. So it's a fitting symbol of this guy's resistance to the Japanese. And in seidek translation, what happens? This guy's not a native speaker of the language either. He apparently does a really good job. So I'm just going to play this one clip and it's thinking where we go. Okay, thank you, thank you. That's the only clip I'll play for now. So quite a bit faster than I was able to read it. He speaks a language called the tile. There are many varieties of the tile, many dialects, and he doesn't understand seidek at all, but he did a really good job delivering these lines. And the translation is basically pretty predictable. It's what you'd expect except for the name of the mountain. The name of the mountain is here, the giak, you see the q again, giak means peak or mountain. And Utsu Utsu Utsik, you see here that Utsu seems to repeat some of the sounds in Utsu. Utsu means hot pepper or pepper or ginger. It's a place where a lot of hot peppers or ginger is grown or where a lot just happens to grow. It's not the same mountain. This is not a translation of Mount Chilai. I asked Daki's father, what were you thinking? And he said, well I don't actually know the name of Mount Chilai but in our language we probably don't have a name. Even if we did, Monorudo would hardly take this mountain as a symbol of his resistance to the Japanese because it's too far away. It's part of somebody else's hunting ground. You would be foolish to go into somebody else's hunting ground that far away. It's part of truku and territory. So if they went into this territory, they'd get their heads cut off. So it doesn't make any sense from their perspective, from Daki's perspective. So he substituted a mountain that's a lot smaller. It's only about 2,500 meters tall. And it's really close to his home village, really close to Monorudo's home village. And that's why he changed it. It's called Fushishan in Mandarin or at least in Japanese. So it's shaped like Mount Fuji. And it's like a mini Mount Fuji close to the chief that led this rebellion's home village. Okay. Okay. And the repeated sounds at the end is because it implies numerousness that there's lots of hot peppers. And I think this is an even better symbol of Monorudo's resistance to the Japanese than Mount Chilai because it's like the hot pepper that the Japanese tried to swallow is hotter than they bargained for, much more difficult to digest than they assumed. So what kind of conclusions can we draw from this or how can we generalize this? It seems like the translators were correcting Ueda's son, the screenwriter's misunderstandings. Ueda's son just misunderstood a stated culture or stated geography and the translators were correcting him and that's why they changed things. Well, that's a good thesis. And that's the thesis that I tried to argue for about a year and a half. When I was doing this research, everyone has a research question. Like, what were the translators doing? Why did they change these things? It was basically my research question and my answer was because they were correcting Ueda's son's cultural misunderstandings. Misunderstandings of their culture. And I had a couple of examples of this. One was quite Tao in the Mandarin and that means hurry up and flee. Run away, the enemy is here. Flee. But I talked to the translators. Actually, I talked to one translator, Iwan Bedi. And she said she did oral history research with older hunters in her village and they said no hunter would ever say flee. And anyone, any hunter that said flee in the face of the enemy would be a coward and would never be able to live it down. So I wondered, well, why would the word exist? If nobody would ever use it. And I thought, well, maybe you could say the enemy ran away or the enemy fled when they saw us. They were so afraid of us that they just turned tail and ran away. But it still seemed rather kind of implausible that a warrior would never use the word flee. The equivalent of the word flee in their language was kudurik. Kudurik, here it is. It's harder to say kyu at the beginning of word than it is to say kyu at the end. But there's kyu at the beginning and kyu at the end. Okay. And so I thought, I thought I'd better keep on doing some more research. And so I asked the other translators. I asked Daki's, is this true? That you can't say this word because it would be humiliating? And he said, that's what Iwan said. That's what Iwan said. So I'm not really sure, but that's what Iwan said. And then I asked Baowanao, who is a hunter. Daki's is not a hunter. He's never learned how to hunt. He doesn't hunt. But Baowanao has been a hunter his whole life.  There's a fine line between flee and houtui, right? And how would you say houtui in English? Retreat. Now, so there's either ignominious retreat or strategic retreat. And for him, kudurik is a kind of strategic retreat. And of course, you would use this word if you were in danger. You would find a better place to fight or fight another day. So I started to question my thesis that the translators were correcting cultural misunderstandings, especially when I checked the film because in the film, in the scenes in which this guy, Baowanao, appears on the left-hand side, he says, kudurik has a translation for kankuaipao or hurry up and flee, hurry up and run away. And all the other examples ended up being the same thing. One of the translators would say, oh, the screenwriter has misunderstood our traditional culture. And so we tried to correct him in our translation. Another example is taiongqiao, which means rainbow bridge. They get to the end of life, and if they are qualified, if they have become real people, then they cross the rainbow bridge into the afterlife. In seidek, it's hako uttuk, which means spirit bridge. It also means rainbow. It either means rainbow or spirit bridge. It doesn't mean rainbow bridge. The spirit bridge is not a rainbow bridge. The spirit bridge appears at night, and it's a ritual bridge. It doesn't take the form of a rainbow, but they happen to use hako uttuk to refer to rainbow as well. So, by using taiongqiao, Ueda-san has misunderstood seidek culture. And I said, okay. And I did some interviews, and I found people who believe that native people, seidek people who believe that the spirit bridge is a rainbow. The bridge that you cross to get to the afterlife is a rainbow. And I checked Japanese ethnography from 1928 or 1929, and according to this Japanese ethnographer, it's a rainbow. The spirit bridge is a rainbow. The bridge that they cross at the end of life to get to the afterlife is a rainbow. So it seems like there are differences of opinion in the seidek community, and you can't say that the screenwriter and the director of the movie is misunderstood. Jiao is the third example. It means proud, but apparently in their language they don't have a positive word, proud. It's only negative.  Negative use of proud, but not when you feel proud of your children's accomplishments. That's a positive kind of proud. So the word is busukuburo in seidek. It's not a good quality in a rainbow, in a warrior. You should translate it padubahom, padubahom, which just means big. Padu is big, and padu means guts, or courage. But actually it's your goal. Your goal. Like this guy's got a big goal. You know what it means? He's a really courageous person. He's not afraid of anything. And so I thought, well, why didn't you just translate it padubahom? Why not just translate it padubahom? And that's related to pride. How is it related to pride?  It's related somehow. A lot of things in translations are related somehow. It's not a mistranslation, because it is, as I said, related somehow. So I looked at their translation, and they did not translate it padubahom. Often when translators say what you should do, or what they did, it's actually not what they actually did. So I took a look at what they actually did. I found a lot of really interesting examples. So this is Ja. This is Monerudo, the chief that launches this rebellion. And this guy is called Taro Noken. You can see him here. He's another chief. And he does not want to do it. He thinks it's a bad idea to attack the Japanese. And so Monerudo convinces him that it is a good idea. How is he going to convince him? He says, we're going to do it for the sake of pride.  I guess in the afterlife we can be proud, and our descendants will be proud of us. So this is kind of a rhetorical appeal to Taro Noken to get him to agree to join the coalition that attacks the Japanese. Okay, and so how do they translate it? Sunu ramen utuk. And so ramen is the root of the word. Prepare is what it means. Actually, it means in advance or prior, but they add all of these other suffix, prefix, and infix to it, and it means that the spirits, or here utuk means spirit, or spirits, the spirits are ready for them. The spirits are ready for them. How is that related to pride? Well, if the spirits are ready to welcome them into the afterlife, it must be because they have done something worthy of pride, something that makes the spirits proud. I guess the spirits are proud of them, and so they are ready to welcome them into the afterlife. So it seems here that this is evidence that they are correcting Way to Sun's misunderstandings. Here's another example. Now, I would like to introduce you to Jiao Ao. Basically, this is... That's Huan Gang Yi Lang, a native police officer that the Japanese trained to be a police officer and a teacher, and then he ends up taking part in the rebellion. So he's a major figure in this incident. And he doesn't want to go through it, either. And so Mona has to convince him, too. How is Mona going to convince him? What kind of rhetorical appeal is he going to use? He says in Mandarin, If you force us to accept your idea of culture, your Japanese culture, then we're going to show you the pride of this savage. And if it were you, you might just decide to sign up, and this sounds great. Pride of the savage. That's something I can get behind. That's something I can support. So let me show you the pride of the savage. I will take you to see the pride of the savage. How do they translate it? Maha nami na. Sumo negun gaya. Gaya means tradition or culture. Rudan nami. Keisun keisun. Keisun namu gaya tamas. Tamas is wild animals. Or the place that they live in. It's outside the village. It's kind of like wilderness. Okay, so how does that translate? Alright, so if you force us to accept your culture, your Japanese civilization, we will follow our ancestral tradition, which you call wild. So where is pride in there? Yeah, it's in there somewhere. I don't know. They just didn't translate it. They're correcting his cultural misunderstanding of us. The crucial thing here is that they refuse to call their tradition wild or savage. For them, it's just as much a civilization as Japanese civilization. I mean, today we talk about multiculturalism. All cultures are equal. And that's the idea that they're expressing here. You can't call our civilization wild. Wild is where the animals live in the forest, in the wilderness, on the mountain. So they're not willing to describe their own culture as savage, okay? Isn't that cool? When I discovered these mistranslations, or these shifts in translation, I thought, God, this is fantastic. Turn this into a book. Here's another example. This is a song that Monerudo, the chief, is singing with his father. He's departing there and there's a rainbow in the distance. The father has come to make a rhetorical appeal to Mona. They say, Mona, don't give up. You can do it. You get tattoos after you headhunt. You get tattoos.   So I know that you've got what it takes. And then they sing this song together.  How do they translate it? Nima riso ka kia. Nima is to whom? Or who's? Riso is youth. Ka identifies the word that comes after is the subject. So kia that. Whose son is that basically? Whose son is that? So once again, pride disappears.  We all feel proud of our children. We have children. So it seems like more evidence that Wade Asung has just misunderstood sadic tradition, especially the communal nature of a sadic society. In the original, a proud person is like individualistic, right? Is this one person, this hero that's done a great deed. But in the translation, it puts this person in a familial context. So I think that's interesting. You must be proud. This is after they launched the attack against the Japanese. And Mona says, don't lose heart. Don't give up. Don't be afraid. Be proud of yourselves. You've already killed 134 of them. I mean, you've done something here. You must be proud. And then in the translation, puku uro moun namu. Your thoughts make your thoughts proud. You must be proud in your hearts. How is thoughts related to hearts in my translation? Well, it's somehow related. I mean, thoughts are in your mind, right? Thoughts are in your mind. And your mind is somehow related to your heart, like in the word shi in Mandarin. The word in their language is similar. It's both your emotions in your heart and your thoughts in your mind. And you'll notice here that they use the word puku uro. Do you remember it? Or have you seen a word? Just now that seems familiar to puku uro. Does anybody remember a word just now that was similar to puku uro? Puku uro? I mentioned also that there are two dialects in the film, or two sub-ethnic groups in the film, doda and dakedaia. Puku uro is in dakedaia. Does anybody remember the word that was similar that is in doda? Just now? Oh no, I actually... I actually put it here. So in... This is in dakedaia. And the same word in doda is pusu kurao. Sorry, you just saw it. But it's not your language and it's not a language you've ever studied. So it's very difficult to remember words. Anyway, they use the word in the translation. So you must be proud. So this example... This example does not seem to support the thesis. Wait a second, it's misunderstood. It's an adic culture. In fact, it seems to support another thesis that the translators themselves maybe don't understand their own language well enough. They don't understand their own culture well enough. They don't have uriaku. They don't have kurao. When translators are translating, I'm translating it in English. I don't assume that I know English perfectly. I'm always checking usages. I'm always checking etmologies. I'm always checking, is this said more often or is that said more often? And I can use Google. But these translators just can't do that. So they rely entirely on what's called this kind of subjective language perception, which can often be wrong. Or it can often be different from the average in a speech community. Because here, they've used this word that means proud in a positive way. I mean, it's obviously supposed to be positive. Be proud of yourselves. It's positive. It's positive in the Mandarin. And it's positive in this language as well. So this seems, again, to undermine the claims made by the translators. But then, we're halfway done. More than halfway done. Much more than halfway done. Don't worry. I now have a methodological problem based on my analysis. You can't say that he didn't Yeah. You can't claim that way to some misunderstood Saedic culture. The translators claim he misunderstood. But I don't believe them. I'm not persuaded by their claims. Okay, so my problem is, why as a scholar am I arguing against the translators? Especially, I'm not a member of this ethnic community. I'm not myself Saedic. I'm not Indigenous. I'm arguing against their understanding of their own language and culture. I'm saying, you guys, you don't even understand your own language and culture. Okay. So why was I doing this? Well, maybe just to prove them wrong. Oh, well, maybe. I don't know. Or maybe to vindicate the way to some. Saying you have unfairly attacked the way to some. But he's actually right. Maybe I could do is to tell the translators that they should adopt a more sophisticated understanding of language and culture. And I would teach them, right? I would be their instructor in cultural studies. So culture properly understood. Culture is not some unchanging essence. It's different for different people in different places at different times. And it's not the logic of our behavior. If somebody says this is not acceptable according to our culture, it's because you persuade you not to do it. People will still do it. Right? It doesn't dictate how people behave. It's a way of talking about how people behave and a way of trying to persuade people to behave in a certain way. And it's as much about lying in persuasion as about truth telling. Then again, so is this a good kind of objective for my research? What right first? What right do I have to explain culture to the translators? It doesn't sound very correct. I mean, be pingsimmo. Be pingsimmo.  These people have lived a long time. They're educated. They're intelligent people. Maybe they more or less know these kind of postmodern claims about culture. And I talked to them and they know it all already. They've already noticed that usages and cultural practices are different from the different villages. They know things were probably different in the past. They know all of this already. They know that culture is constantly changing that they've changed their culture. They've reinterpreted it. Okay, so it turns out that they know it already. I'm preaching to the choir. I'm telling people what they know already. So what am I doing? I mean, this is a crisis in research. What am I doing? What is the point of all of it? Can I salvage something from it? And so I turned to Clifford Geertz, went into my long dark dark, what is it, of the soul? Long dark nights of the soul. I keep a copy of Clifford Geertz's interpretation cultured up by my bed in moments of despair. I turned to Clifford Geertz. So this is from Clifford Geertz. The concept of culture I espouse is scenotic. Believing that as an animal, suspended in webs of significance, he himself is spun. I take culture to be those webs. And the analysis of it therefore to be not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one. Culture is interpretive. We interpret in terms of culture. And so I thought, well, that's pretty cool. And this is already 50 years ago. And have you heard of writing cultures in anthropology? Cultural translation comes from writing cultures. Cultural translation comes from the 1950s actually, from quite a long time before writing cultures. Writing cultures is a book, and it made cultural translation famous. And so today, everyone talks about cultural translation. It's because of this book, Writing Cultures. And so, in using this term cultural translation, they put an emphasis on language. You can't talk about a culture without knowing something about the language. Most people talk about cultural translation. You don't want to have to learn the language. Actually, if you read their claims about what cultural translation is, you've got to learn the language. And you also have to adopt a kind of epistemological humility about culture, about what you know. Basically, the postmodern view of culture I just discussed. Okay, so my topic or my claim therefore becomes, rather than see their translation as a correction, the director's cultural misunderstanding, it's more fruitful to view it as an interpretation of the Musha incident and of adic culture in general. And I made this point, or I made this claim at the beginning, I'm going to try and defend it now with empirical evidence. Okay, so this is Sharen. These two guys are friends. And he's Japanese on the right hand side. He is and he's saying, basically don't take this personally. I think it's a really nice sentiment.  I'm doing this for my kind of cultural to fulfill the cultural ideal of humanity in my culture. Okay, and so it's a blood sacrifice to the ancestors. This is way to some big explanation of why they did it. What were they doing? They were blood sacrificing to the ancestors. They were taking the enemy's blood in a kind of big sacrifice to the ancestors. And they translated I'm not killing people. I'm causing to bleed for the sake of my ancestral spirits. Our ancestral spirits but he says mom.  I'm causing you to bleed for the sake of my ancestors. They are the beneficiary of this sacrifice. So they translated it literally. When Daki's published a book and he said actually it was wrong. It's a misunderstanding of our traditional culture. So I saw that he translated it literally and I said well Daki's why did you translate it literally? If it's a misunderstanding why didn't you correct it? And he said I can't remember. And so I looked at other examples because it keeps on appearing in the text. So Shih Tzu Ling this is the beginning of the attack on the Japanese. He basically says what sacrifice to the ancestors and everybody hears this and they pour down the mountainside into Ushō where all of Japanese are attending the sports day and they start killing people. So the translation is Daki just means kill and it's imperative. So kill all means red head and it's because the Japanese were red hats. The first Japanese they saw were soldiers who were wearing red hats. So kill all the Japanese people. So they did not translate it literally. So sometimes you're translating it literally. Sometimes you're changing it completely. What's going on? So I have to look at more evidence. So this is evidence here. So this is I think Wadis is the leader of the doda the other group that were employed as headhunters. They were hired what's that called? Hired as mercenaries. And this is his Japanese friend a police officer who lives in this guy's village. So in the subtitles it says the doda is the doda is the other sub ethnic group that attacked the Japanese and this is spoken by somebody off screen. It's not one of these two guys. The person who's speaking off screen is trying to persuade Ting Wadis to join the attack against the Japanese. The problem is that Ting Wadis is best friends with this Japanese guy. This Japanese guy ends up persuading him persuading Ting Wadis to attack Naruto and his people. I think he persuades Ting Wadis to become a mercenary. Okay, but the issue here is what do they do with Shichibu? They translated it, or rather the Chinese translates it into Mona has led the dogedaya to love sacrifice, to the ancestral spirits at Lusha and then he goes on to say we have to join them. We have to attack the Japanese too. And in Sadek it says wada dumudun means lead degedaya and de at the beginning means makes it plural dumahor and I just put that as dumahor uta rudan atzbea which means the spirits of the elders of yesterday or of the past and it's in English has led the dogedaya, Monorudo has led the dogedaya to the ancestral spirits so I beg your wondering, what is dumahor?  Two more examples, when you shed blood so this is a song they sang before they slaughtered the Japanese When you shed blood our hatred disappears and this is the whole point of head on Ting the whole point of this blood ritual is when you kill the other guy you're not enemies anymore you become friends and you bring his severed head back to your village and you feed it with whatever rice or millet and then you give it wine to drink and then it ends up becoming part of your community and let's look at the translation so gumadara ku I make you bleed it means finish we complete dumahor and the ta here is we and it means I kill you and then you and I together will complete this ritual as soon as I kill you we complete the ritual it's also a nice sentiment I think I make you bleed we complete dumahor and the third example this is Mona in the speech to rally the troops after the war and it's kind of like Satan in hell in Paris Lost rallying the troops don't give up and in English in Chinese it says I would come home I remember the first time I had hunted I would come home as a hero and I would receive the feast everyone would feast me and celebrate my great deed and I would become a true human being a real man so how do they translate it I'd be taken by them as a true man everyone would say true man is here he is head hunted he is now qualified to be called a true man and to be tattooed on his face which shows that you become a true man a real man dumahor along his community village community dumahor dumahor again here it's dumahor and here it's dumahor dumahor is the godaya so they're cognates it's the same word so what is dumahor now I'm going to tell you it's a blood ritual so Shedaki said Shedjiduling was a blood ritual the sacrifice to the ancestors is a misunderstanding of say the culture and yet they have a blood ritual to the ancestors called dumahor and it's as if Shedjiduling is a translation of dumahor into Mandarin blood sacrifice to the ancestors is a translation of dumahor into English and it's a specific kind of blood ritual it's a blood ritual of reconciliation interpersonal so if I offend like Jewel because I go around offending people this is just kind of from a tsujin da'i is that the expression so I would take a chicken and some millet wine and I would go to you and I would split the chicken's throat and the blood would spill out on the floor and I would give you some millet wine to drink and the ancestors in heaven above would see the blood and would bear witness to my apology would you accept I'm on my hands and knees so Jewel is just my example I'm always thinking so it's interpersonal but it involves the spirits it can also be between villages and I heard a really cool story from a former Catholic nun who talked about a murder there was a murder between two Chinese guys but it happened on the village community on the reservation and one person in the village community said we have to conduct this ritual to tell the ancestors that it has nothing to do with us it's the Chinese people they kill each other it has nothing to do with us it's not our fault don't blame us but the young people in the village they said oh come on that's just tradition that's just superstition and so they didn't conduct this ritual and she said but for ever since for 30 years men in the village have been dying young of liver problems they say it's liver problems but I know for sure a former nun said this I know for sure that it's the ancestors or displeased with us so the ritual of reconciliation always involves the rent of the ancestors bearing witness and so it can be between humans and spirits between human beings and ancestral spirits it can also be between God and human beings most of these people are now Catholics or Presbyterians or church of true Jesus they're Christians one kind or another and they use Dumahuan to refer to Christian communion and it came to the meaning of the term in the intervening 80 years and there's another term for kind of a single Shangri a single overarching or most powerful spirit is Wutuch Tumeninun which means the spirit that wove the lines of life the spirit that wove our lives and perhaps originally it meant animal spirits it was perhaps originally a ritual between animal spirits we're not going to offend any Christians in the room but it's been argued by certain sociologists that the Christian communion is originally a hunting ritual and that the blood and the body is the hunted animal the prey animal and so you have to reconcile yourself with the spirit of the prey animal say basically sorry for killing you but if we don't kill you we can't eat and we hope that you can kind of share in this ritual of consumption of food that you're now part of my body when I eat you but then you become part of the community okay I hope I haven't offended anybody because people's religious beliefs are to be respected so my claim is that Demahun is also an insider's interpretation of the cultural cause of the Ushin incident so according to the translators why did they attack the Japanese on October 27th 1930 they wanted to reconcile with the ancestors the ancestors were angry at them because they had not protected the ancestral lands and the hunting grounds they cut down all these trees from which they were descended the ancestors were not happy with them they were showing the ancestors they still had the ability to protect their traditional hunting grounds and villages they were also reconciling with the Japanese by killing Japanese they reconciled with them there was no hatred between the two groups of people it's also a key word in cultural development in 1930 already mentioned that it's the word for communion it's also the word used for four reconciliation ceremonies the most one of them in 2010 attended by president Mainjo and so reconciliation in 2010 who do you think would need to be reconciled in 2010 80 years after the incident the year before Sadagabalai the film was released who would need to be reconciled two tribes yeah the two sub-edits groups exactly and I've given this talk several times before and you were the first person it's fine it's fine the camels of the camels and the booth okay but I moved and thank you very much exactly right it's a reconciliation between the Doda and the Degudaya remember that the Doda not only were mercenaries attacking the Degudaya when they were defenseless in a refuge but they also got their land all of the Degudaya village lands and hunting grounds were given to the Doda by the Japanese as her reward so I mean if you were Degudaya it'd be kind of nursing a grievance you'd be so it was there's need for a reconciliation ceremony this is the one that Mainjo attended and this is still from the documentary you're going to see if you're still in the mood for a documentary at 330 or 3 or 330 so this is in 2010 okay I said it's not just the at the beginning I said it's not just an interpretation of the incident it's an interpretation of Saedic culture Damahan is a translation in the translation may be an interpretation of the cultural cause of the incident but how can you claim that it's an interpretation of Saedic culture that's a bigger claim well here's my evidence so they're singing their song this is Mona and his father we share in our village basically and the translation is it should be my culture sorry my culture Saedic and so then it's my Saedic culture not ours Saedic culture but my Saedic culture is sharing there Mudodawun Tahiya Tahiya is we and Hia is there there in the village community what is Mudodawun does it look familiar Mudodawun does that look familiar to a word we saw could it be the same the same not the same word but could it be a cognate Damahur or Damahun yes Saedic verbs especially are built up from roots and so the root in this word is H-U-R actually H-U-U-R and it's a ladle or a spoon what do you use a ladle or a spoon for to share a wine or blood or rice or whatever with other people and so this ritual of reconciliation is also the word that they use for share this is reciprocal the two V's make it reciprocal we share amongst ourselves we share with each other we share with each other we share the body of the prey animal the prey animal shares somehow it will share somehow in the ritual and so basically they are defining their culture they are saying our culture is sharing our culture is this ritual of reconciliation and they're not saying that because anybody forced them I mean Wade I said in the original just said we share in our village he's not defining how they can translate he's not dictating how they can translate what they want they translated freely defining their culture as the ritual of reconciliation which at the same time is a ritual of sharing so we should in conclusion we should view these departures from literalism as adic attempts to make meaning out of the musha incident in terms of words like d'mon and gaya that remain important to them today as they try to keep their culture alive and articulate an alternative aboriginal modernity an alternative vision of how to live in the modern world and I think ultimately this is why I'm doing this I mean I wanted to learn this language and I want to make a claim in translation studies and kind of shake up translation studies but my kind of my personal motivation for studying indigenous peoples is that they all offer an alternative to our concrete jungle our screen mediated lives so the final methodological problem is why not just read Daki's Bowen's book if you're interested in his interpretation of the musha incident or his idea of what his own culture is why not just read his book Denshan Balai basically tells you I mean if you want to answer a question you have to think what's the best evidence you can find to answer this question I mean isn't this the best evidence he wrote the book himself why use this translation just to claim that the translation is interpretation so you can you can write a book about it and my answer to this question is that it's important that he use a s'edic to express his interpretation it's important to me that he uses his own language or his explanation is going to be slightly different in his own language than it would be in Manbur and I also personally think that his translation is more interesting than what he says in the in the book but I don't have time to prove that to you today so thank you very much Mohue Namu Balai a previous speaker used this he said thank you individually but it should be no no no he used the plural answer Mohue Namu is you plural Balai truly Mohue is you are generous you are truly generous is how they say thank you very much okay that was again that was an presentation one of the things that was going through my mind was one of the English translation in the English subtitles in the film do they follow the s'edic or the original great question the translator from Manbur into English is not a s'edic but she did her best and she consulted with Daki's Balai and others into a lot of research but there are a lot of serious problems in her English translation because she's basically relying on the Mandarin there are two articles about the English translation and they say that the English translator is closer to say the culture than the Mandarin original as if this English translator doing a week of research is going to understand it better the way to son who has been obsessed about the Musha incident since the 90s so it's an unlikely thesis and I think I I think I proved her wrong but by the way did you talk to Wei? I talked indirectly to Wei I quite asked his assistants and I'll say Wei knows a little bit like the huling is how they say hunt and it's take the dogs the huling is dog the huling is to take the dogs that means hunt because you don't tell people exactly what you're going to do if it's something sensitive so I'm going to take the dogs and you would know what I'm trying to say and so Wei does son explain that as a typo so he understands a little bit did he get was he particularly involved in the process? no he delegated the task of supervising the translation to others who did not know the language the whole story is kind of funny the other thing that I was thinking about was the audience of the film I was wondering what did Zidique who actually watched this film feel about it I don't know if anyone has looked to that question audience response particularly partly what the pronunciation was like and whether they were happy the language was actually understandable you were meeting my friend that introduced me to this stuff in 2011 she was really disappointed and she was disappointed that all this attention for Wei did son the state basically the cn Zhonging it's a film production studio they saved the film and in the film time financing deal the rights to the film are now it's not far still many more Zhonging has the rights to the film the copyright is now they gave him 200 million 200 million dollars in financing what point was I trying to make there? what language how they perceived the building that's right Wei was really disappointed with the language and the fact that all this attention for him not for us, they should listen to us but I talked to other people who thought that it was pretty good the language exchange that I listened to the film line by line when we were listening to it line by line there were a lot of lines he just couldn't understand but when he he rewatched it again not listening line by line but just kind of paying attention actually it's mostly very very good mostly I can understand what they're saying um subtitles anyone who's done the subtitles will know what that's like but when you watch a film you don't catch up your line even though it's in your own language um and uh the audience responses divided depending on whether you're a Dugodaya or a Dodo because many Dodo people have said that actually the film is biased against them it's uh it's sympathetic to the Dugodaya but not to the Dodo it's critical of the Dodo because they were after all mercenaries but I've watched the film a hundred times and I think the film is pretty balanced uh and it's critical of Mona Rudeau uh it's also sympathetic to uh the Dodo chief there's all sorts of different perspectives on the incident in the movie okay we better yeah go ahead I'd like to pursue I'd like to pursue David's question just now I can remember why it matters more I mean I'd say it's not just whether you can understand it it's you know it's whether you know it's uh it conveys in the language that can I just for a moment jump outside and put an example out as well for example there was a film by Tocque du Capemoli a film director at the festival that did not go down well with most people in English because the English was within and I remember asking him why did you direct him the accent in the language that you didn't understand he said well it doesn't matter because they didn't understand English either and however this film won the Tocque prize in Tokyo on the basis of the Tocque of the Japanese subtitles so you know I mean I think Tocque directors like Ruma and Berber have failed in language but other people have a different view on this but there's a power thing here because I'm an English reader and I'm you know and I'm judging it on whether it's good in English well in this movie it was an English film which in all these cases are but nobody's judging this film spoken in sorry the other way on the basis of this little audience you know and just simply I could understand but it was just then in English just understanding it was not sufficient in that sense so there's a whole lot more on the language the reception side obviously you didn't have time to go into it I did say that one line was translated literally Kusudara Uppurudan was a literal translation of Blood Sacrifice to the Ancestors and so maybe that sounds legible in Seidek but they also translated in all sorts of other ways which based on my outsider's view of are perfectly fine in Seidek in translation studies it's domesticating and foranizing it's a guy called Lawrence Benubi has popularized this the literal translation is foranizing a free translation the domesticating usually is the kind of translation we're looking for as long as it conveys an accurate idea of the original culture it's a different case here Benubi's example is Italian translating Italian in English you make it sound English, right but in doing so you miss subtleties in the Italian and so if you're an Italian translator you feel shit but these English readers were babying them we're digesting it or making it easily understandable we should translate it in a more challenging way to force these English readers to learn something about countries that speak different languages in which case the original's manner in Chinese about Seidek so domesticating translation is easier to defend in this case sorry very simple question has the land been returned to the Seidek? it never will, no never will, you're pretty prophetic they still occupy the land it's 80 years and actually when they have these reconciliation ceremonies the idea behind it is from the doda it's like the doda don't think they've been forgiven so come on, come on, we're going to reconcile they've had it four times, why would you have four reconciliation ceremonies unless you don't think that the first three have been been successful and so the attitude in the Degudai was like oh, we've done this already we don't need to reconcile, it's okay it's over, it's in the past they've got three villages and they say well, okay younger generations are likely to disagree with decisions made by older generations yeah, decisions made by the colonial power at the time and then not changed by the the transnational system like you would have thank you very much there's almost like a detective story again it's sort of like you trace and you're going through all the traces but I mean the fundamental question is because the original script was written in Chinese if you look at the Chinese script back the writings are very good so I wonder why was there any was there any process of involving the city or to even give any advice in the writing process before the shooting and why they still got this kind of double sometimes totally not the same sort of context in the translation for example in the film what it says actually is not the Chinese script so why was the case if this being consulted before the shooting okay, yeah if in some cases it doesn't seem like they're correcting his misunderstandings why didn't they do that before the shooting? yeah, why did they correct the Chinese? yeah they tried but he he insisted on Shenzhen Zhu Ling I mean he thought this would communicate would make the film effective in the theater just with sub-piles they've all they've got sub-piles so there's no chance to get into any kind of subtleties or nuances so Shenzhen Zhu Ling let's sacrifice the ancestors Shenzhen Zhu Ling's four characters it's classical it's kind of literary Chinese get Sandy across so they tried to change his mind about these things but he just that's it and they didn't have direct contact with him, Daki could talk to him but for the most part it assisted his hand in the translation second how do you know that it's bad bad Chinese? bad bad I mean I do write but what? like I know if I say bad English it's terrible, it's written terribly but then if you ask me well why how is it bad? it's often difficult to say because it's something I suppose you might agree oh my god you've already written Ji Le Zhu Ling it's not a real Chinese writing it's very awkward and it's not not even literal not an oral language nor a literal language it's making not good writing one could make the thesis that his Chinese was intentionally weird to make it sound foreign to make it so out of size to Chinese well you can't say so that's very common, isn't it? that's very common if you have a foreign person he's speaking English but he's got to speak English in a foreign way in that way I remember I was in the military in a town boy's house we were speaking English right is there more exoticizing? yes the Chinese is exoticizing okay that's a good question any final questions before we have oh yes how many of the how many of the actually survived these two they were almost really decimated 1000 people maybe 150 left 150 to 200 so is there a word for 80% of your population survived? yes majority majority but not quite decimated they were moved in 1931 to this will come up in the documentary if you're interested and not all the villages took part half the villages were non-combatants like Switzerland but they were moved in 1938 to make way for a much more they were moved to another village called which is just across the road from Alibu so it was a tough time these people it's an endangered language very similar to Tagalog Tagalog is spoken by maybe 100 million people so it is spoken by under 10,000 so it's 1,001 for every 1,000 Tagalog speakers there's one over the age of 50 probably cannot speak as well as Mandarin probably does not use it in daily life so it's almost critically endangered thanks for your presentation I love it, it's very fantastic I need to read the subtitle and I want to know the Chinese subtitle is wronged by the waiters that's right yes I have a story here where did you get all these great lines from this chapter 2 okay so about the Chinese title and the subtitle is there is there a purpose is Chinese title is because only for service for the Han spectator because maybe if you really change the Chinese subtitle to correspond to the second subtitle maybe the Han spectator cannot really understand or maybe there's some commercial intention in the Chinese subtitle so that's my question the Chinese subtitle is supposed to be exotic completely normal fluent Chinese it wouldn't be persuasive to the audience because it's being spoken by people who are not speaking Chinese by these indigenous primitive people 2 even though it's exotic it has to be easy to understand because it's only on the screen for 4 seconds to 6 seconds and he wants to sell as many tickets as possible and it's amazing that he managed to break even people were willing to give him 4 and a half hours of their time if you watch both parts a 4 and a half hour film but to learn the language it's 450 hours maybe to learn the basics but that's pretty beside to me actually there's a number of people one of the great things about doing like the the the topic not many people are interested in you find people that are interested in it it's like I'll go to Sweden to meet this guy or I'll go to Japan to meet this guy find somebody like me for some reason maybe just going nuts we decided to spend all this time learning this language we're not sure why but if you found a few I found a few, I just found some guy from England who's in Japan my mentor's in Sweden there's another lady in Japan sorry, if you know anyone oh yeah, a tweet that's not a question are you looking at wiki wiki comments so there's lots of specialized I guess specialized languages yeah there's quite a big movement yeah, I'd like to put the language on wiki witchenery you can find Tagalog on witchenery Sembuano the other major language in the Philippines and other languages are on witchenery Hawaiian, Maori, they're all on witchenery but these really endangered languages spoken by just a couple hundred a couple thousand tend not to be on witchenery there's a movement coming together there was a gathering at University just last week Celtic knot they had so many people there and they're all working together for endangered languages because they're saying that you know, Google might I can't remember so Google might do some things like that we need to be self we have to fight independent we need to have our own it's called created commas open source open education okay, thanks Tweet reach out to the wider language at the news it does remind me a few years ago we had the father of research there were others before but he is kind of the major figure in Austrian legal linguistics in Taiwan and he's written a lot of popular linguistics books these languages are important what really struck me from his talk was how long each language is going to be extinct for you, do you feel like that? that's my second book ah, okay in the revitalization of these languages in general in June of 2016 Taiwan president Tai at the beginning of her term he promulgated a law called the Indigenous Language Development Act five times more money for Indigenous language development which includes education they now have immersion preschools there is an immersion elementary school in a tile and so it's a start, it's not Greenland in Greenland you can go to university I think you can go to university in Welsh yes, it's a start unfortunately one of our speakers a last term Douglas Coulomb looking out he had to be a white I want to meet this guy yes but that was the subject of his PhD I see it in another Indigenous language in general yes, you have to catch up with him on your next visit any final questions before you break it oh yeah, go ahead when there's someone to make a series of movies about sample truth how do you think about it can he do better than this one? avoid those questions, those problems I don't think so he's going to need a lot of money I think maybe he can grab source it I'd give him some money he's trying to raise money but it wasn't long at the box office his latest fundraising movie so we didn't make any money probably lost some money he's trying to make a trilogy about the 17th century when the Dutch were there and so it's Dutch and Japanese and Chinese farmers and Suraya Indigenous people and we have some idea what the Suraya language was like because we have some we have we have Dutch was it done by the Dutch? were these documents done by the Dutch or by Catholic missionaries in the 17th century they recorded this language in Romanization in the Roman alphabet and there's an Australian linguist that's publishing articles on what Suraya grammar would have been like in the missionary now so it's possible they could try to make up some version of Suraya the way that they had done this for other movies like Apocalypse was in the language spoken in Yucatan it was like kind of Maya kind of Aztec I'm not too sure but they try to make it sound archaic they kind of reconstructed some idea why it was spoken in the 17th century for Apocalypse so they might try something like that for this film but the main goal here is not to be historically accurate its main goal is to sell a lot of tickets and to kind of inspire Taiwanese people with a sense of national identity I think that's the main purpose above and beyond making money the main purpose is to inspire people to believe in themselves and in in Saita Kapala there's all this stuff about the importance of belief these people who attack the Japanese they're basically terrorists we would call them terrorists but they believe in themselves they have a belief and way to sign as a Christian that's really important we don't have anything besides the market and make lots of money I want to make lots of money I want a house, I want an air conditioner but I'm beyond that what is it all for if we're in a liberal democracy there's no pre-given what is this for so the way the sun wants to tell Taiwanese people that it's because we are the people that have this kind of history we should be proud of it okay on that note we should take a brief coffee break for our screening of Kusukunye Kusukohane Kusukunye it's the tree the origin tree and Darrell will just say a few words at the start of that screening so let's thank Darrell