In English, duanwujie (端午節) is rendered as “Dragon Boat Festival,” a holiday featuring racing in decorated boats. This is what English textbooks and Chinese-English dictionaries say, while Internet searches also give similar answers.
The term Dragon Boat Festival is in the world’s two major dictionaries: Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary, while it is recognized by Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia.
In the past few years, some began calling for a direct transliteration, “Duanwu Festival,” according to its pronunciation in Mandarin.
However, “Duanwu Festival” is used only about once in every 50 references, demonstrating that it is not widely recognized.
The third edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the largest of its kind for US English, defines Dragon Boat Festival as “a Chinese festival held just before the summer solstice that has as its chief event a race among long narrow boats resembling dragons.”
The Oxford English Dictionary, seen globally as an authority on the language, includes an entry on Chinese dragon boats, and has Dragon Boat Festival under that listing.
Dragon Boat Festival is associated with traditional customs — primarily the boat races and eating zongzi (粽子, glutinous rice dumplings), but also bathing in herbal concoctions, hanging wormwood and calamus, and drinking realgar wine.
The most attractive feature about the festival in the West is the dragon boat racing. The races have become a sensation in many countries and it has its own world championships.
Zongzi does not have the same level of popularity in the Western world. When it is translated into English, it is usually as a vague and indirect expression, rice dumpling, sticky rice dumpling or Chinese tamale, likening it to a Mexican food.
Compared with jiaozi (餃子, dumpling) and baozi (包子, steamed buns), which are in the Oxford English Dictionary as “loan words,” the transliteration of zongzi still has a long way to go.
Dragon Boat Festival is a distinctive traditional celebration. The holiday has even been listed by UNESCO as an element on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Following the inclusion of the Dragon Boat Festival and “dragon boat” in leading English dictionaries, the next step should be to market zongzi so the world can learn about and fall in love with the delicacy.
Zongzi, once it becomes widely recognized in other cultures as a delicious treat, would surely find its way into authoritative English dictionaries as a loan word.
As the Chinese proverb goes, “when conditions are ripe, success will come naturally.”
Hugo Tseng is an associate professor and former chair of Soochow University’s English language and literature department.
Translated by Eddy Chang
As strategic tensions escalate across the vast Indo-Pacific region, Taiwan has emerged as more than a potential flashpoint. It is the fulcrum upon which the credibility of the evolving American-led strategy of integrated deterrence now rests. How the US and regional powers like Japan respond to Taiwan’s defense, and how credible the deterrent against Chinese aggression proves to be, will profoundly shape the Indo-Pacific security architecture for years to come. A successful defense of Taiwan through strengthened deterrence in the Indo-Pacific would enhance the credibility of the US-led alliance system and underpin America’s global preeminence, while a failure of integrated deterrence would
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
On Wednesday last week, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) asserting the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) territorial claim over Taiwan effective 1945, predicated upon instruments such as the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation. The article further contended that this de jure and de facto status was subsequently reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly issued a statement categorically repudiating these assertions. In addition to the reasons put forward by the ministry, I believe that China’s assertions are open to questions in international
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment on Friday last week to add four national holidays and make Workers’ Day a national holiday for all sectors — a move referred to as “four plus one.” The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who used their combined legislative majority to push the bill through its third reading, claim the holidays were chosen based on their inherent significance and social relevance. However, in passing the amendment, they have stuck to the traditional mindset of taking a holiday just for the sake of it, failing to make good use of
RSS