Animal Farm

Thomas Tsoi

Animal Farm – Cantonese Edition is my second attempt at translating literature into written Cantonese, after The Little Prince in Cantonese. For a long time Cantonese was seen mainly as a spoken medium; although written Cantonese has often existed in various forms, using it on more serious occasions is a relatively recent development. Written Cantonese has always been limited by sounds without characters, characters with many meanings, meanings with many characters, and characters whose original forms are hard to trace; moreover, Hong Kong’s mixed Chinese–English setting means that some nouns have almost no widely accepted Chinese-character rendering (for example “BB”), which adds to the difficulty of writing Cantonese. Translating classic literature into written Cantonese is, to some extent, a way of perfecting this writing system through practice and making some suggestions on how to write it. So, carrying on the ideas of my earlier book, this time too I took written Cantonese as a literary medium as my starting point, hoping to present a classic work, in words that are accessible but not vulgar, in the Cantonese (written Cantonese) that Hong Kong people know.

As a work of literature, close attention to wording is a must. So this translation took particular care with the handling of several songs and verses, trying to keep their literary form. Also, reading this dystopian classic in a time of upheaval, Hong Kong readers may notice many points where the story can be compared with the real world; many episodes easily call to mind political phrases we know well. Indeed, applying such terms directly would give local readers a certain “familiarity”. But in translating this book my main concern was how to present the work in authentic Cantonese, so I did not want the whole book filled with such imported expressions, turning bland and overly stiff. Therefore, in word choice I followed the principle of fidelity to the original and avoided unnecessary political jargon.

On the other hand, as a small experiment in written Cantonese, using only Chinese characters with no mixing of English was a major principle and one of the biggest challenges. When dealing with words that have no standard written form, I generally first consulted the theories about the original character of the word, and used the original character if it was easy to write and read. But often scholars disagree about these original characters, or the original character is too obscure, and then this book uses the more common loan character. In short, I have no insistence on using “original characters” or “correct characters”. But I do care about standardising how characters are used, believing that standardisation will benefit the circulation and learning of written Cantonese in the long run, and I hope this book can make a small contribution there.

In addition, sentence-final particles play an especially important role in Cantonese, where subtle differences of tone can change the meaning of a sentence markedly. So, after consulting and synthesising other sources and refining them, this book adopts and advocates a scheme for writing sentence-final particles, aiming for one sound, one character, to make sure that the tone of every sentence-final particle can be marked accurately. To achieve this we used some relatively uncommon characters with the mouth radical (口). Worth mentioning is that some of these characters (for example 𠵝、咓、𠻺、𠺢) are not easy to type with ordinary Chinese input methods; in particular 𠵝 sits in Unicode’s Extension B, where font support is scarce, and I hope the situation will improve.

Here is an overview of this scheme:

It should be noted that Cantonese has a great many sentence-final particles, and the table above does not necessarily include all of them. On page 12 of the book I also provide another table, listing an example sentence for each of these particles and its function. That table does not claim to explain the particles precisely; it only hopes to give you a starting point to discover the fun and interesting side of Cantonese.

Another aim of this book is to promote the use and learning of Jyutping. When I first conceived this book, besides hoping it would bring Cantonese a classic work of literature, I also hoped to bring a useful teaching resource to those learning Cantonese. So originally I did consider annotating the whole book in Jyutping, but given that the word count is not small, annotating everything would make the book seem too thick, so in the end I settled for annotating only some words and phrases, hoping it can still help friends who are learning Jyutping or Cantonese!

Finally, I must explain that the idea of translating this book arose not long after The Little Prince in Cantonese came out in 2017. As friends who have read that book will know, it took a full seven years to be born; this one also dragged on for four years, but that is progress. The reason it was faster is largely that I increasingly realised the importance of seizing the moment: much that can be done today may not be possible tomorrow, so every opportunity must be cherished. That this book can be published today is entirely thanks to a group of loyal friends who rushed to help me. From Themis, who did the illustrations, to Stephy, who helped me pore over every word, Annvea, who arranged the music, Charlie, who proofread, and Cheryl, who wrote the handwritten lettering: without them there would be no book. I must also thank Prof. Simon Shen and Ying Ying for not letting me down and agreeing to write prefaces. Prof. Shen explains international relations in an accessible yet profound way, and perhaps nobody could explain the significance of this classic novel for our times more clearly. Ying Ying was my university classmate, a gifted student of translation, and when I run into difficulties in translation I sometimes ask for advice. Of course, any errors or omissions are entirely my responsibility.