In English, duanwujie (端午節) is rendered as “Dragon Boat Festival,” a holiday featuring racing in decorated boats. This is what English textbooks and Chinese-English dictionaries say, while Internet searches also give similar answers.
The term Dragon Boat Festival is in the world’s two major dictionaries: Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary, while it is recognized by Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia.
In the past few years, some began calling for a direct transliteration, “Duanwu Festival,” according to its pronunciation in Mandarin.
However, “Duanwu Festival” is used only about once in every 50 references, demonstrating that it is not widely recognized.
The third edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the largest of its kind for US English, defines Dragon Boat Festival as “a Chinese festival held just before the summer solstice that has as its chief event a race among long narrow boats resembling dragons.”
The Oxford English Dictionary, seen globally as an authority on the language, includes an entry on Chinese dragon boats, and has Dragon Boat Festival under that listing.
Dragon Boat Festival is associated with traditional customs — primarily the boat races and eating zongzi (粽子, glutinous rice dumplings), but also bathing in herbal concoctions, hanging wormwood and calamus, and drinking realgar wine.
The most attractive feature about the festival in the West is the dragon boat racing. The races have become a sensation in many countries and it has its own world championships.
Zongzi does not have the same level of popularity in the Western world. When it is translated into English, it is usually as a vague and indirect expression, rice dumpling, sticky rice dumpling or Chinese tamale, likening it to a Mexican food.
Compared with jiaozi (餃子, dumpling) and baozi (包子, steamed buns), which are in the Oxford English Dictionary as “loan words,” the transliteration of zongzi still has a long way to go.
Dragon Boat Festival is a distinctive traditional celebration. The holiday has even been listed by UNESCO as an element on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Following the inclusion of the Dragon Boat Festival and “dragon boat” in leading English dictionaries, the next step should be to market zongzi so the world can learn about and fall in love with the delicacy.
Zongzi, once it becomes widely recognized in other cultures as a delicious treat, would surely find its way into authoritative English dictionaries as a loan word.
As the Chinese proverb goes, “when conditions are ripe, success will come naturally.”
Hugo Tseng is an associate professor and former chair of Soochow University’s English language and literature department.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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