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Mind your language

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To c***, or not to c***?

In the end, Martin Merz compromised: he used son of a bitch.

For an author, an editor and even a publisher, writing swear words into a story is a matter of determining a character's boundaries. But for a Chinese-to-English translator of a story containing C-words, word usage requires a balance of bilingual and bicultural sensitivities.

Martin Merz is the co-translator of English, a best-seller in China, by television screenwriter Wang Gang. It is the semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age story of Love Liu, a 12-year-old boy growing up in provincial Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution. Central to the story is Liu's fascination with his bourgeois, cologne-wearing English teacher, Second Prize Wang, who claims to carry the only English dictionary in the province.

Although it's told with the innocence but shrewd insight of a pre-pubescent boy, Love's language is naturally crude, which proved a constant challenge to Merz.

'In those days boys really swore. They spoke very roughly. Even if they didn't know what it meant, they'd repeat it,' Merz says.

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