I had a little test read of a short ‘googlized’ text with Jia and it does indeed sound quite funny when the two of us read it. For Saturday we will try it out as an introduction to the main performance. I’m trying to learn this text and it is hard to cram it into the brain. If I were learning proper Chinese that would be one thing but learning nonsense texts is maybe more hard still. Staying on this theme, I saw a nice hoarding the other day, one of a series of equally scrambled translations. It struck me when reading it that it might have not been translated for the benefit of Westerners like me but rather translated for Chinese readers of the sign. The presence of an English text on the hoarding could be understood as making it appear to be more international and potentially of higher value. I get the impression that the English language, has a quality here that is quite independent of the meaning that the individual words convey.
