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Notes -
Why did the Chinese Communist Party choose an accented translator for its recent new leadership press event?
Below is the CCTV (state media) livestream of the event, time stamped to the start of alternating Chinese / English speaking portions. It continues through when Xi begins speaking with the same translator about two minutes later.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XPElpDddUWo&t=527
The translator, or maybe more fittingly the teleprompt reader, considering the translation was certainly done well ahead of the event, speaks with a clear Chinese-British accent. I would venture to guess that he had gone to university in the UK, and no earlier (i.e. emigrated for elementary or middle/high school). Further, he sounds young, and so it seems unlikely that he is an important party cadre who was chosen for political seniority.
Is there anything to be read into this personnel choice? Considering the event is bilingual and clearly aimed at the international audience, someone in charge of optimizing its success, I'd think, would select for basically two dimensions:
Political purity: no chance a prankster or saboteur would use the opportunity to shout anti-CCP slogans to embarrass the regime
Technical capability: no stage fright, clear enunciation, diction, volume, etc.
Considering how prominent this event was, I'm shocked that the party could not find someone trustworthy who also happened to speak English with no accent. Is it because #1 contradicts #2, whereby someone born in the US or UK could not be trusted?
I think it's fair to claim this is a nothingburger. But the CCP is highly choreographed, so this decision was surely intentional. Does it speak to its weakness, therefore, that it is unable to present a high-quality English speaker whom it can also trust politically?
Alternatively, does anyone think the choice of an accented translator was intentional? That is, the party subtly shows the world that while it wants to keep it informed, it does not care enough to optimize for the listening experience of its international audience?
I spent a small amount of time working in China and also visited a number of times to hang out with in laws. In the Shanghai subway 10ish years ago the English translation of the announcements was, to my American ears, a fairly silly fake-British somewhat-Chinese accent. Somehow that’s what they settled on as ””proper”” English translation. Visiting other parts of China I again encountered similar faux-British English official announcements. Strangely the Beijing subway lacked this silly fake accent and had what I can only assume was an American born Chinese state the stops in regular English.
I wouldn’t read into this too much. This is just one of their many strange things.
Why do you think British-accented Chinese English is "silly fake accent" but American-accented Chinese English is "regular English"? Because you are an American? For the other way round, I find non-Western speakers of English with American accents to be "silly fake accents".
It's fair to say that to count as "regular English", you need to at least sound like some relatively large subset of native speakers who speak it as a first language. Accented Chinese English wouldn't qualify.
Probably more restrictive than that; it's a fairly limited set of U.K. and American accents; Scottish, Southern US, Down East, the old New York accent, etc, need not apply. Nor would any Indian accent qualify.
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