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
With each passing day, the threat of a People’s Republic of China (PRC) assault on Taiwan grows. Whatever one’s view about the history, there is essentially no question that a PRC conquest of Taiwan would mark the end of the autonomy and freedom enjoyed by the island’s 23 million people. Simply put, the PRC threat to Taiwan is genuinely existential for a free, democratic and autonomous Taiwan. Yet one might not know it from looking at Taiwan. For an island facing a threat so acute, lethal and imminent, Taiwan is showing an alarming lack of urgency in dramatically strengthening its defenses.
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US
I still remember the first time I heard about the possibility of an invasion by China. I was six years old. I thought war was coming and hid in my bed, scared. After 18 years, the invasion news tastes like a sandwich I eat every morning. As a Gen Z Taiwanese student who has witnessed China’s harassment for more than 20 years, I want to share my opinion on China. Every generation goes through different events. I have seen not only the norms of China’s constant presence, but also the Sunflower movement, wars and people fighting over peace or equality,