This is my translation of a social media narrative posted by someone living through the COVID-2019 outbreak in China. The original author is "Qian Wan" (a pseudonym.)
I originally translated this thinking it could become part of a group project, but logistical difficulties prevented them from using it, so I'm publishing it here. Anything I'm unsure of is marked like this.
Translation
This is an account of daily life in a rural county seat in Jiangxi Province, China, under the shadow of the COVID-2019 outbreak. No cases have been confirmed, but the popular sentiment is one of anxiety. It is in such moments that we most want to maintain empathy, for in the face of this crisis all people are feeling a shock to their spirits. No single element can exist separately from the whole.
These verses are parodies of the song "Hakuna Matata", from Disney's animated film The Lion King. I wrote the first two stanzas on 2018-01-14, and the other two on the publication date above.
I recently joined the unCoVer initiative [homepage / Facebook / Instagram], a group of volunteers translating Chinese accounts of ordinary people's experiences while living in areas affected by the nCoV-19 epidemic. I've done line editing, copy editing, and proofreading of translations, and may later be doing translations myself. If you're interested in a new perspective on this global event which is affecting so many lives, I urge you to read and subscribe to unCoVer's social media pages.
Besides its verbal use, 给, with the reading gei3, is also (roughly speaking) "near-obligatory case marker for indirect object". But 给 has at least one other use, as the example 把什么东西给烧了 demonstrates. The function of 给 here seems similar to the usage of 弄 and 搞 with complements like 对 and 好, e.g. 弄好/搞好 "improve; put right".
I think there may be other nuances related to animate nouns, too -- so what's up? I'll keep an eye out. (While translating "Iron Bull and Sick Duck", I found some examples of this phenomenon to copy into here.)
2020-05-14: Aha! The AllSet Chinese Grammar wiki contends that this is a passive construction. It all makes sense now. (Be warned that AllSet occasionally offers quite poor English translations, like these.)
Fop:
Your skills --
Your accumulated advancements --
Have insufficient increasement!
Dandy:
Upwardified are my upgrades,
My many masteries --
That is, my skills!
Fop:
Predictably, you are plusless,
Listless, and lazy!
You have! No! Skills!
Taking notes on characters suitable for creating a new Chinese name. The one I have doesn't sound very Chinese, having been bestowed somewhat haphazardly by otherwise-excellent teachers of introductory Chinese.
I stepped outside to take the air, but stopped short when I heard
A squeaking cry, as issues from a wounded, bleeding bird—
Or rather, from no bird at all, but from an injured bat;
The wingéd mouse, the flying shrew, the aviating rat.
The sound came from the corner of the garden, past the gate.
I went inside to fetch my coat—we've had a chill of late.
Beraimented, I crept along. The batlike wail grew near.
On garden path I crept, until the screeching filled my ear.
And ... what found I? A broken bird? A bat, brought down to ground?
'Twas neither thing that drew me there by way of eerie sound.
I took a knee to do some work. The squeaking went away.
No longer will that broken sprinkler keen like dying prey!
Today is Day 2 of 2 for IndieWebCamp Online 2020, which means today is Hack Day! My goal for the day is to reconstruct my poems page.
[As of 15:32:57, I'm all done!]
My first task today is to solve the page-redirect woes that I've been blogging about since a few days ago. Diligent implementation of the solutions given in S3's documentation got me nowhere, so I'll use a little JavaScript to redirect from the old poems URL to the new one.
[2020-02-09T09:38:25-0800: first task complete!]
With the redirect in place, I can proceed to the larger of today's tasks: breaking out each poem onto its own page. This will accomplish two goals:
Despite getting up an hour too early, I am excited for IndieWebCamp Online 2020! I'm facilitating a session on collections, an IndieWeb term for an explicit grouping of posts which is conceptually distinct from a typical chronological feed.
By the powers vested in me, this post indicates that I am following Malcolm Blaney's Indieweb Planet, so that the Planet follows me back. Gazounds!
[Edit: it appears that the Planet has reached its subscription limit. Curses!]
[Edit, 2020-02-06T16:53:56-0800: Discussion with Malcolm on IndieWeb chat shows that I was mistaken about the subscription limit. His Planet has successfully subscribed to this website. Baboosh! Mission Accomplished! And it even exposed a bug on my site: I'd somehow deleted the rel="feed" link in my HTML <head> tags, which is how subscribers to this website know to retrieve posts from the blog.]
Edit, 2020-02-09T13:52:23-0800: I've finally solved this problem by replacing poems with a stub page that redirects to poems/index, using JavaScript to preserve the URL fragment. Mission accomplished--no thanks to S3!
Edit, 2020-02-07T20:15:29: I've tried using the other form of S3 redirect: uploading a zero-byte file called poems and adding a redirect from that file to the new /poems/index location. We'll see if that works.
Edit, 2020-02-07T10:48:32: Dammit, I don't know what I'm doing. Can anyone help?
Redirecting from the no-longer-existent poems file to the new poems/ in the "Static Website Hosting - Redirection Rules" section of the S3 Console is not working at all: I get the AWS-default 403 (Access Denied) return code (which AFAIK is masking an underlying 404 Not Found, given that poems has been deleted from the bucket.) I'm already stuck, and it's only step one of the plan below! Here are the routing rules I'm using.
2020-12-23T22:18:52-0800 follow gwern's example Book reviews are sorted by star, and sorted by length of review within each star level, under the assumption that longer reviews are of more interest to readers.
2020-09-21T15:18:51-0700 document submission/creation times for Sith Lord Challenge entries
2020-09-21T13:03:00-0700 Turn "full" (vs "truncated") designation on Favorite Poems into structured data, for use in template that positions small-font full/truncated over the top-right of a blockquote :^O oh yeah oh yeah
My first hobbyist programming project was to enhance my D&D game with a system for determining the prices of in-game items. To reach this goal, I built up a pipeline of tools which generated terrain with elevation, moisture, temperature, and climate; used pathfinding to construct a road network; rendered the world map as a vector-graphics file; and specified "recipes," like this one, delineating the raw materials and labor needed to construct each purchasable trade good.
Pouring thousands of hours into a sprawling project over two years solidified my love of programming, expanded my brain, and got me seriously writing on the Web for the second time. However, as the work of a beginning developer, "the economy project" is sloppy.
