An unhappy ending

The last workday of 2010 is over. Finally.

2010 ends with disappoints, disappointed with Beijing, with my job.

Over the past decade Beijing has grown more and more uninhabitable.

The number of automobiles in the capital has more than doubled since 2002, reaching over 4.5 million today and far outgrown road networks. Main roads are basically parking lots even at high noon, making traveling from one place to another an ordeal.

While car industry is booming, air quality is getting worse. (Beijing is notorious for that.) Besides car exhausts, “dirty industries” in the city and nearby provinces are major contributors. Thanks to “made in China”!

Despite the poor physical environment, house prices have tripled in the past 5 years. The population is swelling. There is nothing you can do without queuing: taking the subway; using an ATM; shopping at a supermarket and seeing a doctor… The list is endless; so is the queue. What’s more annoying is that there are some barbarians who don’t queue at all.

The megacity is eating away its residents’ lives day by day. Nevertheless, these factors cannot stop people from flocking in. Regional disparities in China are excessively large and resources are allocated to first tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai. As a result, manual laborers come along and college graduates remain here no matter how hard life is.

For my job, I’m very disappointed at my boss for not keeping her promise. Ai. Let it go…

Do we still need translators?

A few weeks ago I was helping a friend translate two college application essays from Chinese to English. The essays were about his travels around the world and they added up to 5,000 Chinese characters or so. He’d been to 40 countries and visited numerous scenic spots: the fjords of Sweden, Salamis of Cyprus, Santorini of Greece, the Bosphorus Bridge of Turkey… Many of the names were new to me, and under a tight deadline, I didn’t trouble to search them one by one. I copied and pasted the whole essay to Google translate and got a satisfying English version, which I would rate 6 or 7 out of 10. Then I corrected the grammar mistakes and trimmed some sentence structures. The essay was near perfect!

I hate to admit it but Google Translate has a bigger vocabulary than I and it’s strong in terminologies. It’s more frustrating to find that Google is able to do a better job than a translator.

For the time being, its weakness is in grammar. And the English to Chinese translation doesn’t work very well. But don’t worry. I won’t be surprised when one day Google translate replaces human translators.

Fish Tank

Fish Tank is a gruff and ruthless version of An Education. Both movies are the best I’ve seen this year.