I-Tea-S Event: Translation and Tea Making in Japan and China

Date/Time
Date(s) - March 16, 2022
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Categories No Categories

We are happy to announce that the I-Tea-S translation team has translated two thirds of The Little Tea Book! To celebrate this milestone, we held the second event in the I-Tea-S event series. We were hit with a hard spring rain and had to move under one of the tents, but that couldn’t deter us from enjoying our tea! In fact, the rain made the tea feel like an even cozier treat.

This time around, we devoted most of the event to discussions about how the translators from each team made certain translation decisions. A notable example of these discussions is that the Chinese team discovered several historical inaccuracies in the original text, which they had corrected in the translated text. A lively discussion ensued about how the translator is to manage their responsibility to the original author and their responsibility to create a useful and true end product. Another example deals with a poetic or literary portion of the original text, in which the original author argues that tea is a comfort and something to be enjoyed whereas coffee is more like a medicine and thus is not enjoyable. You can imagine how our native Spanish speakers must have felt about such a characterization of coffee! However, any bitter feelings they may have had were short-lived as we all sipped on Sencha green tea and nibbled delicious mochi while enjoying a matcha tea brewing demonstration.

Be on the lookout for the email invitation to our third exciting I-Tea-S event, to be held in April! We’d love to celebrate with you, come rain or shine.