Chinese translation of 'human' in SF settings

I don't know how many Chinese speakers are there here, but I've encountered a strange problem.

In English, it's easy to distinguish between 'humans' and 'turians' and 'vulcans' etc.

In Chinese, this becomes strangely difficult because the word for human is simply 'ren' (人). But to name other alien species, you will also have to attach the same word 'ren' at the end of their names, like for a vulcan, it's wa er ren (瓦尔人). This gets worse when you want to use 'human' as an adjective, like 'human male'.

How do they get around this? The closest I can think of is to call humans 地球人, (Earth people), but I don't know if anyone really does that.

Suppose if you leave out the 'race' modifier, you can easily assume that when you mean 'Ren' - as in that man or woman, you assume they're human like you (or you don't know their origins yet).

Well, what do you mean? If you leave out the qualifier then it would be assumed to be human. Any adjective simply changes the meaning from human to something else.

"ren" is simply person. You need a modifier to make it male or female or you could use another word from another dialect but that’s neither here nor there.

So how do you modify "ren" to specify you're talking about a human person?

That's the problem I'm having. Closest I can think of is saying "Earth person". (This leads to the other problem of translating 'Human Alien', which would become something ridiculous like 'foreign planet Earth person') It wouldn't make sense, for example, if aliens who hate humans complain about 'ren' because when speaking among themselves, 'ren' would also mean their own people. It only means 'human' when we humans speak among ourselves.

Damn, would be nice if I had an official Chinese translation of a famous SF novel at hand.

edited 13th Aug '11 8:30:54 AM by Exploder

I've only taken a year of mandarin so far, but I know enough to agree that "Earth People" would be the closest translation.

Though according to google translate, "Human" in chinese traditional is Rénlèi (人類).

Take automatic translators with a grain of salt, and instead manually hit dictionaries and grammar books (which you can easily find on the internet owing to Mandarin Chinese being the world's most commonly spoken language.)

edited 13th Aug '11 2:02:13 PM by annebeeche

Oh, I see what you mean about the word.

Okay, I was misunderstanding the problem.

This is going to be tricky because in dialogue, they'd still say only "ren" when talking about themselves but both sides would do this. However, I think you can probably modify that without any damage to suspension of disbelief, simply because it'd make your work much less confusing.

The word has basically always had this problem :P

So, I don't know if the Chinese already have a convention for this but you know what, let me ask some cantonese speakers to see if they know how to get about this quandary. Unfortunately, i don't know any who are into sci-fi.

Depending on how you want to portray your aliens, the ambiguity this produces could actually be an asset. (For a while, I considered having all species in a particular setting refer to themselves as "humans," though I eventually concluded that readers wouldn't accept it.)

edited 13th Aug '11 11:19:33 PM by feotakahari

It would not be too unreasonable for all races to call themselves the equivalent of "people" and call outsiders "strangers"/"foreigners"/"aliens" - it pretty much happens here between cultures. Ren, people, humans, folk, gens, volk, leute and so forth all pretty much mean the same thing just in different languages.

"Celt" comes from "Keltoi", which means "stranger" in Ancient Greek. "Welsh" comes from "Wealu" - Saxon for "foreigner". "Alien" also means outsider or foreigner and is applied to humans from other countries as well as hypothetical entities from other worlds.

If one were translating from German into English, "Leute" would be rendered as "people" - it's not a big leap to expect that when translating an alien's language, their word from themselves would most accurately equate to "people" as well (and, depending on the author and their own Translation Convention, may be rendered as "people" or "Minbari".)

Having humans and all the alien races referring to themselves as "Ren" would be quite acceptable and the canny reader would quickly determine that when a human says "Ren" (s)he means humans and when a creature from Vitvodle VI says "Ren" that he/she/it means his/her/it-self and others from the same planet.

Each would then use whatever modifiers are appropriate to denote those not of their race or others of their race but not the same planet (e.g. former/current colonies).

When I was working on a Traveller-like RPG scenario of my own, I had a table of races with their names for themselves and the other races of whom they are aware. Some of the races had a root word (roughly meaning "people") that was modified to denote that they were referring to people from somewhere else, some of which were the nearest they could pronounce other race's own name (no doubt meaning "people") tacked onto their own word for "people".

Norman Conquest Canine knows what he's talking about.

I teach ESL to a class of Chinese students: I will ask them.

However,if it is a translation then they would probably use a phonetic loan word. Canadian is "jia na da ren".

Ok, I understand the problem better now. A person is "ren" and you tag that on the end of a place or other descriptor to designate that type of 'person'. As I mentioned, Canadian transliterates as "Canada person". A dwarf could be "zhu" or "zhu ren". A lizard man translates directly as "xi yi ren". Similarly, a Martian is "huo xing ren" (Mars person) while Mars itself transliterates as "fire star". A space alien is "yang xing ren" (foreign star person). However, Spiderman transliterates as "spider hero" and uses xia instead of ren or nan (male) or han (man).

Where they don't use ren is for supernatural entities used either literally or figuratively. So goblins, elves, monsters, witches, devils, demons, spirits and the like have their own words and don't end in ren. Additionally, terms of abuse to dehumanize don't use ren either. So they say "yang gui" for a "foreign devil" (more literally, a "foreign ghost") and the word for monster - guai wu (literally, a strange thing) - can also be applied to an eccentric person.

Used by itself, "lei" (類 trad. 类 simpl.) means "kind; type; class; category" but also "similar; like; to resemble". The other translations for human and humanity use characters that correspond to emotional or behavioral characteristics. Interestingly, anthropology is "ren lei xue" with "xue" being the science or -ology.

The planet Earth is di qiu 地球 - literally, "earth ball".

So ren lei (人類 or 人类) is probably what you are looking for. However, if all humans came originally from Earth then they might be di qiu ren 地球人. I will go back to my students and pose a questions something like this: If Mars had both humans and lizard men, and Earth had humans and lion men, what word would you use to describe all the humans (both Martian and Earthling)?

edited 16th Aug '11 3:30:05 PM by 66Scorpio

Yeah, Renlei. That's what I posted, but as it was from Google Translate, I was skeptical.

That's what it would be in normal usage; so say my students. In a sci fi setting they are not sure because they are not into it. The question I posed doesn't make sense.

And I think I made a mistake above. Space alien should be wai xing ren, not yang xing ren.

There was mention that languages tend to be self referential in a way. In my own work I started with a name - Fantasian- and then started working backwards to make us a language with "fastas" meaning "people" or "The People".

I'm going to be teaching in China starting next month so I am trying to learn more of the language. It would be interesting to know at what point (along the rubber head alien to starfish alien and beyond spectrum) an alien stops being wai xing ren and becomes wai xing yao or what have you? At what point do they lose their "ren-ness".

As for Google Translate, if you have tried to go from Chinese to English you get an idea of the limitations of the technology.

edited 17th Aug '11 1:04:11 PM by 66Scorpio

Or they could even name aliens like the Chinese name their children- I.E., their "aspirations" for this particular race, or what they hope this alien race might be.

Don't know how it might work, though.

They use a lot of phonetic translations and short forms thereof. "America" is shortened to "mei" (pronounced "may") and Americans are mei ren. The fact that America - mei guo - transliterates as "Beautiful Country" (and Americans are "Beautiful People") is coincidence.

The name Clark is pronounced ke-la-ke and is basically three simple but meaningless characters. When I spelled it with three different characters that had different tones I was politely told that was wrong. The fact that the characters literally mean "visitor-leave behind-krypton" was lost on them.

Bottom line, there is really no Chinese term for homo sapien. I just can't find it.

Plausibility rules. Run a new idea by an expert and if it is "plausible" - not even logical or likely - then people will by into it.

Wouldn't the term Chinese term for "homo sapien" be "homo sapien"? I thought all those scientific latin names were supposed to have universal use?

When you think about it, it's actually kind of strange that any language makes a distinction between "human" and "person." When are you ever going to meet a person who isn't a human? Outside of speculative fiction, of course :)

Depends on your views regarding animal rights, I suppose.

Not necessarily. The only time latin is relatively included in chinese is with "Pinyin", which is basically the chinese alphabet (Jhuyin) written in latin characters to help ease the transition into the chinese language and visa-versa. Also, for example, latin isn't a universal language of SCIENCE! Japanese scientists learn german because that's their scientific language.

Someone should really contact the President of Science and get them to sort that out.

EDIT: A thought occurs: how do Chinese people refer to Neanderthals and other early hominids? 'Cause those would be Real Life examples of non-human persons.

edited 19th Aug '11 3:44:13 AM by RavenWilder