{"id":82554,"date":"2015-02-10T14:32:13","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T19:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=82554"},"modified":"2016-05-25T10:36:22","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T14:36:22","slug":"one-wine-two-wine-red-wine-blue-wine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/10\/one-wine-two-wine-red-wine-blue-wine\/","title":{"rendered":"One Wine, Two Wine, Red Wine, Blue Wine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Naming wines in translation.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Georg_Emanuel_Opiz,_Der_Saufer_1804\"<\/a>

Georg Emanuel Opitz, Der S\u00e4ufer<\/i>, 1804.<\/p><\/div>\n

If, to bedazzle your beau or belle, your tastes often turn to thoughts of white tablecloths and candlelight, your thoughts will likely turn to tastes of wine.<\/p>\n

But which wine? It can be hard to navigate those artisanal descriptions, so easy to mock\u2014notes of saddle leather, jujubes, and turpentine with a hint of combed cotton, and so on. The basic questions are no simpler, though. \u201cRed or white?\u201d ignores orange wine, whites tinted a little longer than usual from the grape skins: basically the opposite of ros\u00e9<\/a>, where red-wine grapes are peeled faster than usual. There\u2019s also gray wine (vin gris<\/em>, actually pinkish), which is white wine from black grapes usually used for red wine such as pinot noir, and even yellow wine (vin jaune<\/em>), a special variety from the Jura in eastern France, though what white wine isn\u2019t yellow when you think about it. Proven\u00e7al pink wines\u2014ros\u00e9s\u2014are colored gooseberry, peach, grapefruit, cantaloupe, mango, or mandarin, according to the Provence\u00a0Wine Council: vote for your favorite<\/a> here. <\/p>\n

\"Vin_Jaune\"<\/a>

Vin jaune: the author\u2019s Valentine\u2019s Day plans.<\/p><\/div>\n

What are these colors anyway? \u201cRed\u201d wine isn\u2019t actually red, like fire engines or stop signs, any more than \u201cwhite\u201d is white like snow or those tablecloths. And we don\u2019t have \u201cwhite grapes\u201d in English, though we do have red: we have green grapes (and yellow raisins), and black, purple, and blue grapes, too. Color perception, and color words, are vast and fascinating topics, best plumbed in the magnificent, luxurious, inexhaustible Color and Culture<\/em><\/a> by John Gage, from which I take much of what follows. Different cultures have different color schemes, and as the centuries go by, especially if paintings and fabrics fade or are lost, it can be hard to know what people meant by a given word.<\/p>\n

Purple, as in the Roman \u201croyal purple\u201d whose misusers could face the death penalty, probably meant a luster or shimmeriness, not a hue. There are color-fast<\/a> artworks, like mosaics, that show garments known to be purple, but which we would now call vermillion-red, green, or black, with shimmers of light. In Medieval Spain, the word for purple meant a thick fabric, probably silk, of almost any color; the Anglo-Saxon translation of purpura <\/em>was godweb<\/em>: a good, or godly, weave.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s perse<\/em>: no one knows what the hell that means. In the eighth century, it was a synonym for hyacinth; in Dante, it\u2019s purple-black; at its heyday, it was the darkest and most expensive blue; its last appearance, in the mid-sixteenth century, was as the color of rust. It, too, might be more like a kind of material or some non-hue color value.<\/p>\n

The most well-known color-translation problem is Homer\u2019s \u201cwine-dark sea\u201d\u2014the sea rarely being, of course, what we would call the color of wine of any color. Explanations relying on poetic license or metaphors of intoxicating depths quickly run aground<\/a> on the rest of Homer\u2019s color terms: He calls oxen \u201cwine-dark,\u201d too. The sea, when not \u201cwine-dark,\u201d is \u201cviolet,\u201d an adjective he also applies to sheep. Honey is \u201cgreen.\u201d There are five words for hues in all of Homer\u2019s work, including words for fiery-red and purple-red, but none for blue\u2014despite living under the most splendid, perfect blue in the world, Homer calls his sky starry, or broad, or great, or iron, or copper, or bronze, but never once blue.* Kuaneos<\/em>, which in later Greek meant blue, is used only for a storm cloud, Hector\u2019s hair, Zeus\u2019s eyebrows: \u201cdark.\u201d Maybe he had no choice but to call the sea wine-colored.<\/p>\n

So about that \u201cred\u201d wine, maybe it\u2019s best to stick to the winemaker\u2019s name on the bottle? That presents other problems, in some languages. English speakers take for granted our ability to just borrow some French if we need it, for Burgundy, champagne, Ch\u00e2teau Lafite-Rothschild. We have the same alphabet as French, give or take a few accents, and more or less know how to pronounce the unfamiliar thing if we see it. Even words from non-Western languages are usually easy to transliterate: Honda<\/em>, Al Jazeera<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Not so in Chinese. And with high-end wine exports from France hitting record numbers this decade because of Asian demand\u2014French wine took in ten billion euros in 2011, beating the previous record by more than 10\u00a0percent, and 2.5 billion was from Asia\u2014what the Chinese consumer sees as a wine\u2019s name has started to make a big difference.<\/p>\n

The challenge of translation between Chinese and European languages never ceases to amuse, for which see any number of so-called Chinglish<\/a>\u00a0Web sites illustrating signs or instructions gone terribly wrong. Translations of proper nouns into Chinese pose even more problems, because a French or English syllable<\/em> can be matched by a dozen or more different Chinese words<\/em>, each with a different meaning. As a result, even straight transliteration runs into semantic cross fire: not only must the name be easily pronounced and appealing in Chinese, and sound roughly the same as the original, but unlike a transliteration into English it will mean something, too, one hopes something positive or brand-appropriate. It was a bummer for Microsoft that \u201cBing\u201d is\u00a0most naturally heard in Chinese as \u75c5, meaning \u201cillness\u201d or \u201cbeing sick.\u201d Good save, though: they called their search engine bi-ying<\/em> (\u5fc5\u5e94), \u201cmust answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two companies you hear about who aced the challenge are Subway, which in Chinese is sai-b<\/em>a<\/em>i-wei <\/em>(\u8d5b\u767e\u5473),\u00a0\u201cbetter than a hundred flavors,\u201d and the brilliant keh-k<\/em>o<\/em>u keh-luh<\/em> (\u53ef\u53e3\u53ef\u4e50), which sounds like \u201cCoca-Cola\u201d and means \u201cdelicious happiness\u201d or \u201cgood to drink, makes you happy.\u201d I like Groupon\u2019s name: gao-peng<\/em> (\u9ad8\u670b), \u201cclassy friends\u201d; I\u2019d probably like Groupon more if it were called Classy Friends in English, too.<\/p>\n

What about wine? As you\u2019d expect, total chaos. Some names could be translated (Ch\u00e2teau La Lagune as lang-lihu, <\/em>\u201cbeautiful lake\u201d), some wines simply renamed: Ch\u00e2teau Beychevelle became the auspicious longchuan <\/em>(\u201cdragon boat\u201d), playing off the Viking ship on its label. Calon-S\u00e9gur lucked out with tianlong <\/em>(sounds like \u201cCalon,\u201d means \u201cdragon of heaven\u201d); Lafite hit the jackpot with the blingy lai-fat, <\/em>\u201cCome get rich!\u201d and became the lubricant of choice for negotiating big-money Chinese business deals. Grand Puy Lacoste got saddled with \u201ccrocodile wine,\u201d because of the crocodile logo of Izod Lacoste, no relation. Crocodiles being neither auspicious nor tasty, sales sagged.<\/p>\n

There have been two attempts I know of to nail this all down, in the interests of making everything easier to sell. In 2009, the publisher of Singapore\u2019s The Wine Review<\/em> and founder of the bilingual\u00a0Chinese Bordeaux Guide offered phonetic translations of the top Bordeaux ch\u00e2teaux names; in 2012, after a year of consultation with the sixty-one ch\u00e2teaux in Bordeaux\u2019s official 1855 Grand Cru classification, Christie\u2019s unveiled its list<\/a> of \u201cofficial translations\u201d and said that all but four ch\u00e2teaux had approved it. They also announced the first-ever Chinese wine-tasting notes, a whole other crosscultural kettle of crocodiles. They prepared a poster to be \u201cgiven to Christie\u2019s clients and journalists,\u201d but the project seems to have quietly disappeared\u2014as far as I know, the poster never came out, although a low-res version is used to illustrate this article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I talked to Simon Tam, the Head of Wine, China, at Christie\u2019s, when the plans were still moving ahead, and asked him about their translations. He wouldn\u2019t say much about the process\u2014was the project managed in English, Chinese, or French, for instance\u2014but he did say that Christie\u2019s had decided to come up with the list on their own initiative. Tam felt that \u201cthe time had come for an authority to set some standards,\u201d and clearly Christie\u2019s wanted to be identified with these high-quality standards. No more flat translations of Cheval Blanc as \u201cwhite horse\u201d\u2014they looked for \u201ccharacters that are elegant, less day-to-day, words that look good together.\u201d (Still, Cheval Blanc did great<\/a> at last year\u2019s Sotheby\u2019s auction marketed as a celebration of the Year of the Horse, and China-savvy diplomats<\/a> have already stocked up on R\u00e9serve de la Ch\u00e8vre Noire, Le Bouc \u00e0 trois pattes, and La Ferme Julien\u2014goats black, three-legged, and on the bottle\u2019s label, respectively\u2014for next week\u2019s Year of the Goat New Year\u2019s gifts.)<\/p>\n

Tam approached the ch\u00e2teaux and asked if they were happy with their Chinese name, and if they weren\u2019t, he and his team offered suggestions. Their goals were \u201caccuracy and identity,\u201d what Tam called the ch\u00e2teau\u2019s \u201cbrand DNA\u201d: for instance, masculine or feminine.<\/p>\n

Fine French wines and the booming Chinese market were \u201cthe newest combination on the block,\u201d and \u201call we\u2019ve done,\u201d Tam said, was \u201cfast-track it for the industry.\u201d Here\u2019s to fast-tracking new combinations, and maybe even some new colors, this Valentine\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n

*Near-quoted from William E. Gladstone, who called attention to the issue in his three-volume Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age <\/em>before becoming one of the greatest British prime ministers in history: \u201cHomer had before him the most perfect example of blue. Yet he never once so describes the sky. His sky is starry, or broad, or great, or iron, or copper; but it is never blue.\u201d The \u201cbronze\u201d sky is mentioned in Gage.<\/small><\/p>\n

Damion Searls<\/a>, the <\/em>Daily\u2019s language columnist<\/a>, is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Naming wines in translation. If, to bedazzle your beau or belle, your tastes often turn to thoughts of white tablecloths and candlelight, your thoughts will likely turn to tastes of wine. But which wine? It can be hard to navigate those artisanal descriptions, so easy to mock\u2014notes of saddle leather, jujubes, and turpentine with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":754,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[807],"tags":[16983,16984,6037,5312,6604,2930,16981,16982,1511,2682,16978,16985,530,6382,16979,8120,16980],"class_list":["post-82554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-translation","tag-bing","tag-cheval-blanc","tag-chinese","tag-christies","tag-colors","tag-dante","tag-gray-wine","tag-greek","tag-groupon","tag-homer","tag-red-wine","tag-the-wine-review","tag-translation","tag-valentines-day","tag-white-wine","tag-wine","tag-yellow-wine"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow Do You Translate a Wine?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Colors, grapes, brands: the language of wine presents a bevy of problems for translators. 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