Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1634: Found in Translation

Episode Date: December 24, 2020

Ben Lindbergh talks to Jacky Bing-Sheng Lee, translator of the traditional Chinese edition of Ben’s book The MVP Machine, Hyunsung Kim, translator of the Korean edition of The MVP Machine, and Brendan O’Connor, assistant professor and linguistic anthropologist at the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University, about the challenges of translating a baseball […]

We will share the words To make things work We will terrorize everyone Together We will roll the stones And break them all I need you not to stop Hello and welcome to episode 1634 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Meg Rowley is off today because it's Christmas week and she is a sensible person.

So I, a less sensible person, am joined by three other people I've been wanting to talk to for a while. And our topics today are translating baseball terminology into other languages and the role of bilingualism in baseball. in baseball. And joining me to talk about that in Taipei, Taiwan, is Jackie Bing-Shang Li, the translator of the traditional Chinese version of my book with Travis Sochik, the MVP machine. Jackie, welcome to the podcast. Hello, Ben. Thank you for having me here. And it's really a pleasure to be joining you guys and also be on this pod. I'm a loyal listener myself. Well, thank you. The pleasure is mutual. And I have a copy of your work, the Chinese language edition of the book, which came out in May on my shelf. And it looks great. I'm sure it reads great too. I do not yet have a copy of

the Korean language edition of the book, which hasn't come out yet, but it will soon because of the efforts of another of our guests today Hyunsung Kim. Hyunsung is joining us from Seoul South Korea where he has recently completed or is just about to complete I suppose the Korean translation of the MVP Machine Hyunsung thank you for coming on. Hyunsung Kim Hi thank you for having me and yes I'm still in the translating phase, but hopefully I'll be finishing up and having it out sometime next year, probably towards the opening day of the KBO season. Great. Okay. Well, I apologize to both of you that Travis and I wrote so many words. It's got to be a lot of work for you too But I am glad that you've done it And unfortunately we are not able to be joined by Shinya Iwasaki

The translator of the Japanese edition of the book Which is the only other edition of the book so far Although we have sold the Spanish language rights But we are joined instead by Brendan O'Connor Who has not translated the MVP machine into any languages that I know of, but has read it in English. And Brendan is an effectively wild listener, but more importantly, he is also an assistant professor at the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University and a linguistic anthropologist who wrote an interesting article earlier this year

about bilingualism in baseball for the anthropology magazine Sapiens. Brendan, hello. Hello, Ben. Very, very happy to be here. I suppose I could take a stab at translating the MVP machine into Spanish if nobody else is available, but sounds like a lot of work. Yeah. Yeah. We sold those rights a while back and I have not heard anything about that, but I hope that that comes out at some point. So I'm happy to have you all here. And maybe it's self-indulgent of me to want to talk to the translators of my book, but I'm fascinated by the process. And based on the response in our Facebook group to a post by Jackie this spring, it seemed like a lot of our listeners would be.

So I imagine the process of translating an entire baseball book into another language would be doubly difficult if you did not know and love baseball. And so I was very happy to hear that Jackie and Hyun Sung were doing the translations because I know that they're really interested in the subject and that they know a lot about the subject and that they have worked in other capacities in baseball before. So I want to ask you about your previous translation efforts and how you got to translate the book. But I first want to ask about your baseball backgrounds, because Jackie, I believe not only have you done some writing about baseball, but you've done some broadcasting and Hyun Sung, you've done some scouting. So Jackie, could you tell us a little bit about your other baseball work that is maybe

non-translation related? Yeah. So I have been writing about baseball, particularly major league baseball since 2013 when I was a freshman in the college. And at that time, it was just a part-time job, a sidekick. And since then, I have grown more and more interested into the Major League Baseball. And since the start of 2016, I started to work part-time for Fox Sports Taiwan. And they are the main broadcasting partner with Major League Baseball here in Taiwan so they produce a lot of the content on Major League Baseball so I wrote

article for them and I actually have been writing for articles about Major League Baseball until now and I also broadcasted several games this year and also hosted a baseball tonight show here in Fox Sports Taiwan and I also have also been writing Major League Baseball articles for several outlets and my friend Adam Wong and I also hosted a baseball podcast in Mandarin here in Taiwan. And it's mainly about Major League Baseball. So I've done a lot of things, mainly about baseball here in Taiwan. And actually, I'm making a living out of it right now. Oh, that's great. And were you doing English broadcasts or Chinese broadcasts or both?

I do Chinese broadcast of MLB game for Fox Sports Taiwan, but I only did several of them for this postseason. And I also, because of the pandemic, the 11th Sports Taiwan broadcast CPPO games in English for the first time in the league history this year. And I was privileged and honored to be able to be part of that. So this season, I broadcast like more than like roughly 50 games, 50 CPBO games in English as a play-by-play man this year. That's great. Okay. And Hyunsung, I don't know how much you can share about your baseball work, but I know that you have done some scouting and worked for teams. Can you talk about that at all? for the World Baseball Classic, helping out the international umpiring crew. We had one Korean umpire there.

And this is when I got into working in baseball. And this is my eighth year working as a scout. I'm currently with the Kansas City Royals, mainly covering South Korean baseball, both amateur and pro. Cool. So I do want to get to the translation, of course, but since we're on the subject, I guess I should ask how the pandemic and the way that KBO and CPPL games

really had a huge international presence this year affected both of you, if at all. I guess, Jackie, clearly maybe it did because there was even more work or more interest, but what was it like for suddenly there to be a lot more broadcasts and English language broadcasts and people in the US following the CPPL really closely? Yeah, it was really unexpected that because of the pandemic, the League and the broadcast partners have the opportunity to bring the English broadcast to

the international audience. Before this year, I believe no one would have imagined that this would ever happen, that CBBL will have a chance to be broadcast in English because we don't have that appeal and that market. And so the pandemic sort of is like a blessing in disguise for the league at least this year because it brought the pandemic brought international attention to to the league and time has also just selected cpbo's opening as one of this year's big moments of the year. And that is also a very good thing for the league. And also personally, because of the opportunity to broadcast the game in English, I got the chance to broadcast the game. And to be honest, my dream growing up

was to become a play-by-play man or broadcaster of baseball games. So that actually expedited the process of making a dream come true for myself because this April, when I first broadcast the CPBL game in English, that was my first time doing the job. So I don't know.

Certainly, the pandemic is certainly a bad thing for everyone. And I don't want to see anyone hurt and be badly influenced by the pandemic. But actually, because of the pandemic, I had quite a year for myself, my baseball career because of the pandemic. So it's really unexpected and also don't know how to describe it. the KBO, which was really prominent here in the States. I suppose your work with the Royals, I don't know whether that was affected directly. I guess MLB teams have been interested in the KBO for a while now and more and more interested over time as more players have come over and have proved themselves here. But did it affect either your work or I guess just the perception of the league internationally? I would suppose the perception has been pretty widespread because the Korean government was able to...

We had an early spike in February, and that was when all the KBO teams were... when they went abroad for their spring training. And when they came back, we had a big spike, and we weren't sure that the league was going to, the season was going to happen. But then slowly, the government kind of took control, and the number of confirmed cases went down, and in May, what we were able to have is open the season. That was very good for the league.

And then we had some coverage from ESPN. People were able to put a lot of intention watching the KBO. So it was very good for the league. And for my work, there were some limitations because first they didn't have, they didn't allow attendance. Right. And we were kind of included in that. So we had to wait until July to actually go and watch the game. Yeah.

Well, it must be nice to be somewhere where things were handled much better than they were handled here so that baseball could resume sooner and also so that society could not collapse. So Brendan, could you tell us a little bit about your work and what got you interested in bilingualism in baseball? I know you speak Spanish, of course, but maybe you could explain how that relates to your day job and what led you to write about baseball earlier this year? Sure. Well, I decided to write about it because I thought it would be fun. And I also thought it would be interesting. I'm a huge baseball fan. I'm actually a Royals fan. So I'd like to thank Hyun Sung for all the good work you're doing for the Royals in Korea. You're welcome.

But it's interesting. So I'm an educational researcher and I'm also a linguist. And my work, my research, I should say, has been inspired by the fact that I've worked primarily as a teacher of Mexican American and other Latino students, despite being a white person from the Northeast US who grew up as a native English speaker and then learned Spanish later on. U.S. who grew up as a native English speaker and then learned Spanish later on. So, you know, I've had an interest in the education of bilingual students, Mexican American students, like I said, for a long time. And that includes working with immigrant families and just being conscious of what immigrant families face in and out of school. So a lot of my research language-wise focuses on how bilingual students make sense of their experiences at school in English-dominant contexts and all the issues of culture and

identity that come into that. So baseball, from my perspective, is a kind of fascinating place to look at some of these same issues from a different angle. I mean, you do have, in the article that you mentioned before, Ben, I talk about the different kinds of migrant streams that converge in various locations in the baseball world. I mean, maybe the most visible one is this migrant stream or this movement that sort of parallels the movement of a lot of my students and their families from south to north, from places like the Dominican Republic and Venezuela to the United States. But then you also get these interesting examples of people who were

born and raised in the U.S. who then end up going to places like Korea and Taiwan and even the Dominican Republic and Venezuela during the off-season. So I think, you know, I was thinking about what Jung Sung said about working as a translator and interpreter for the international umpiring crew during the WBC. I mean, that's the kind of situation that I can imagine would bring forth some of the stuff that I think is really fascinating about bilingualism in baseball, which is, it's not just a matter of figuring out how to translate one term to another term, right? And not to suggest that that in itself is an easy matter, but I think anytime you have people coming into these contexts where multiple languages are in play, you're also dealing

with multiple cultural frameworks, immigrant stories and journeys that might look very different, different issues of identity. And some of those issues have to do with how people perceive the game of baseball itself to be changing. And as listeners, I think, will be aware, that's often a source of conflict or debate within the baseball community, both the professional community and among fans in the United States, is what do these changes, demographic changes in baseball that are often associated with

different ways of playing the game or different, you know, different stances with respect to the so-called unwritten rules of baseball. A lot of times there's issues of culture and language that kind of get entangled in those kind of moral debates or moral panics about the future of the game or even the present of the game. So I just think a lot of the stuff that comes up for me in schooling about working with students from immigrant backgrounds and bilingual students, we can kind of see a lot of those same tensions come up in a different way within baseball. And I think it's just fascinating to consider that. Yeah, me too. And maybe we can talk a little later about how that relates to the KBO and CPBL. And Brendan, you might have better questions to ask our other guests than I would.

So I do first want to talk about the translation itself, that part of just technically translating these words and these baseball terms and this somewhat technical terminology in some cases with this book into other languages. So I guess, Jackie, I'll start with you. Can you talk a little bit about how you became a translator and whether you've worked on baseball translation before and how you ended up working on the MVP machine? Yeah, so I majored in foreign languages and literatures in National Taiwan University, I majored in foreign languages and literatures in National Taiwan University and I went on to study in the graduate program of translation interpretation of the same school. So I believe translation interpretation has always been my passion and also my profession, something

I have been good at. And I'm also very interested in English throughout my life. So I combined that with my passion and interest for baseball, and it's sort of a natural thing for me to become a baseball writer because I can translate a lot of information from the United States where baseball is very popular and also where baseball is originated from and to Chinese to give the people the Taiwanese baseball fans the major league baseball information and also the latest development of baseball here in the U.S. bring them to Taiwan. And the reason why I can translate this book is because the editor of the publisher, Infortress Publishing here in Taiwan, he found

the book on Amazon, and he was looking for sports books that have good ratings and might attract Taiwanese readers. And since the MVP Machine is dubbed Moneyball 2.0, and Moneyball has also been popular with Taiwanese audience and readers, so the editor believed MVP Machine would also be a good book to import to Taiwan. And at that time, I didn't know the editor nor the publisher. So it was actually through an upperclassman of my graduate school that I got the opportunity. He was already translating books for the publisher, and he recommended me to the editor to review the book because he knows that I'm specialized in baseball writing. So when he recommended me to do this, I was actually serving in the military. We have a compulsory military service here in Taiwan.

So I still had like 20 days left to serve, but I was still able to finish writing the MVP machines book review in the troops. So I sent the book review to the publisher and the publisher can vet the project and eventually the publisher passed the project and became responsible for the translation of the book that's that that's how i got the job yeah jackie i was going to ask hyunsung might be able to speak to this too, but some of this comes out of my own ignorance of what baseball fandom and fan culture is like in Taiwan and Korea. But I guess going back to my point about language and culture, how much cultural unpacking or explanation of the US baseball context did you have to take into consideration or to do when you were translating

the book? Or did you just sort of assume that your audience would already have that context? I'm thinking, for example, of the whole phenomenon of driveline and kind of private player development. What a big deal the Astros cheating scandal was for fans in the US. Did that stuff make it over there so that you could anticipate people already had that context? Or did you have to do a lot of additional explanation in the book? Yeah, so I believe like the Astros sign stealing scandal, and all the Major League Baseball big news is actually make their way to the Taiwanese baseball circle. And a lot of fans know about it because we also have very popular baseball YouTubers that make videos of those news

and make a lot of content on Major League Baseball events. So I believe the big news and also the big events that happened in Major League Baseball, most of the fans here know about it. But when I translate the book, I still have to explain something that I believe some things that I think the fans here would not be familiar with, with such as like stack cast or some cultural references like smurf because smurf is mentioned it's not related to baseball but it's mentioned in the book and also some references about the movies the lines in the movies and i feel like i have to explain those. And also like pitch effects, hit effects, I will add footnotes to further explain those things, details that based on my knowledge

about the fans here in Taiwan and their knowledge about Major League Baseball, I will make some decisions to decide whether I should add a footnote or not. Got it. Hyun Sung, I would make some decisions to decide whether I should add a footnote or not. Got it. Hyun Sung, I don't know if you want to respond to Brendan's question also and say how you handled that, but I'm also interested in the story of how you became a translator and started

translating this book. Well, I grew up in the States. My father was a journalist, so I was lucky enough to live in the States. I went there twice, and that's how I kind of picked up my English. But I didn't really think I would be a translator until I went to college and served my military service. Koreans have to serve a mandatory military service for about two years. And it's not until then that I kind of realized, okay, this is kind of my skill. I should work on it. And also, I grew up as a baseball fan, and I kind of had this vision or dream that I would kind of converge them together. I did start out as a translator after my military service, but I did different things.

I translated video games and theses and articles and whatnot. and theses and articles and whatnot. And as I mentioned before, it wasn't until 2013 where I got to actually translate baseball through the World Baseball Classic. About the book, I think after my fifth season as a scout, I kind of realized I wanted to translate baseball books. I did some research on how many books from North America were translated over here. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Yeah, and there weren't many.

It was about 64 books so far. Most of them were novels or children's books or books on fundamentals. And there weren't many books on the latest trends. So I kind of felt like the Korean audience was being left out in that particular area. And I started off translating. I actually translated Keith Law's Smart Baseball last year. And then I got to know your book through, I actually, I think I saw someone post something on social media right when the book was released.

And I bought myself a copy, and I kind of knew it early on. I heard phrases from a lot of people in and out of baseball. And I kind of skimmed through the book and I decided I should go for it. Well, I'm glad you did. Jackie, is that true there too that I'd imagine maybe there are even fewer baseball books from America available in traditional Chinese? Is that the case? I'm sure you can get Moneyball in almost any language at this point, but is the selection pretty slim beyond that? almost any language at this point, but is the selection pretty slim beyond that?

Yeah, I haven't done the research like Haung Sam did on the translated books, baseball books in Taiwan from North America. But I did have several books at hand here. And I believe the number is below 64 for sure. But in recent years, we have more books being translated into traditional Chinese. And here I have like eight of them, including the MVP machine. But Big Data Baseball was translated into simplified Chinese. We haven't had a traditional Chinese version, but it's still Chinese. And also, Whenever I Wind Up, and also Rivera's Autobiography, and Zach Hample's Watching Baseball Smart, and also The Teammates by David Halberstam. David Halberstam, yeah.

That's a great book, yeah. Yeah, so there are several of them, but it's most from these past two or three decades. And beyond that, I believe there weren't any translated baseball books from the United States. So tell me a little bit about the process and what the difficult parts of it were. And Jackie, you wrote a little bit about this in the Facebook group, which was really interesting early this year. But what were some of the challenges, I guess,

specific to either this book or a baseball book in general when translating it into your language? So for me, actually, translating something about baseball is a lot easier than translating something not about baseball. Because I'm familiar with the subject and the genre. And I'm also familiar with your work and Travis' works. So that really helped me a lot. And I have watched a lot of videos of Trevor Bauer's pitching motions and also drivelines

videos so because the books mentioned a lot about those pitching mechanics and also motions and these things I believe could be very hard for a translator who doesn't know anything about baseball or anything specifically about the pitching mechanics. So I think that actually helped me a lot and I have an easier time to translate a baseball contact than other things. But having said that, it's still a very difficult project because of the sheer amount of the words. I haven't done any translation of books before this project. So this is a very new experience for me. And also, another difficult part is that there are so many company and brand names that don't have any Chinese translation. Yeah.

So my editor asked me to translate into Chinese as much as possible. So I did. But some of them are just untranslatable, like StatCast, PitchFX, HitFX. I just couldn't find a way to make it into Chinese. So I have to stick with the English names for these names in the books. Do you actually write it in English or do you just sort of spell it out phonetically

or how does that work? Oh yeah, I just write it in English. But since the book, the traditional Chinese version is the characters are not lined out horizontally. It's vertically because Chinese characters, you can line it up vertically. So the English, when you have to line English vertically, it looks a little bit awkward. So that's why the editor asked me to translate those names into Chinese as much as possible. But if I can't do that, you still have to stick with the English characters.

And Hyunsung, how about you? I know we've been sending emails back and forth when you've had an occasional question or just wanted to make sure that you were interpreting the meaning correctly and happy to help if I can just to make it as good as it can be, but you haven't needed help with most of it, obviously. So how has it gone and what have you found the challenges to be in this book specifically, or I guess in translating baseball material in general? I would say that the most difficult thing for translating English to Korean or vice versa is probably the word order. Because in English, it's subject, verb. But in Korean, the verb goes at the end.

So when you have a conversation in Korean, you have to hear the whole sentence out. out yeah so it it that that that's always kind of tricky for us uh translators over here to to translate a english or a european language to korean the way we koreanize the the alphabet names there's like for the korean government kind of set rules for that so we would have to figure out I mean some some of some of the names like popular names they have a a sample for us to just write it write it down but uh you know most of the names in in baseball, it's very new. You don't see those in the samples. I would have to kind of figure out going through their way of the formulas that they have and kind of put it in a way that kind of fits their rules and at the same time sounds close enough how the name is pronounced.

Also, the different terminologies. Some of the terminologies, you just can't translate it word for word. It's more sense to sense. So that was some of the challenges. And going back to Brendan's question, maybe I would say around five to ten years ago, the general Korean baseball fans weren't really aware about American baseball, like the culture and the news and the current affairs that's going on over there.

But I think recently they've kind of caught up on those, especially with, I think especially became more aware after players like Eric Thames or Merrill Kelly or Josh Lindblom kind of played over in Korea and then made their way back to the big leagues. That's when the general audience kind of opened up and and kind of they they had more interest in in American baseball but still you you do have to you know explain certain terminologies or certain why this sentence makes sense you you kind of have of have to put footnotes

and you have to kind of elaborate on those. Yeah, listening to Hyunsum talk about the language sequence, the difference of language sequence of Korean and English make me think about in English that you can have a lot of relative clause behind a noun. So you can add a lot of things after noun just to describe the noun. But in Chinese, if you put a lot of adjectives before a noun, it can feel very, very awkward.

We usually don't put that many adjectives in front of the noun. So it can be a very tough task when there is a very, very long relative clause behind a noun. I have to start a new sentence to finish describing that certain thing. So I believe that posed as a particular difficult part when I posed as a particular difficult part when I tried to went through the project. And just for the non-linguists and translators out there, when Jackie says relative clause, right, he means, you know, a part of the sentence that you can put after any noun to sort of modify that noun or to explain what's happening with it. So, you know, driveline, comma, which is a baseball

development facility located in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and where players sometimes go in the offseason in order to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's saying that it's sort of awkward to figure out how to pack all that additional information, which would be modifying or explaining the noun driveline in the rest of that sentence. Jackie, did I sort of explain that well? Yeah, exactly. That's what I want to express. I see. And Jackie, is there much English slang in baseball in general in the CPBL? I mean, when people will refer to certain events or certain things happening, Will they sort of borrow English language terms or will they translate it or will they just use their own slang for those things?

I think mostly we borrow a lot of baseball slangs from Japanese baseball culture. Yeah, because Baseball was passed from Japan to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial era from 1895 to 1945. So during those 50 years, the Japanese people passed the baseball culture to Taiwan. So a lot of our baseball culture was inherited from Japan. So if you go to an amateur baseball park and you hear people in Taiwan playing baseball, and when they're on the field, they will yell a lot of different terminologies and terms and different usages. And most of them are relevant to Japanese terms and Japanese so I believe most of them is from from Japan instead of the United States and Hyunsung what about in Korea and in the KBO yes a lot of English English baseball terms are kind of they've kind of made their way into the Korean baseball culture. Most of them, they'll just use it, like home run or strike, ball.

Those really fundamental terms are mainly English. And also, yes, Korea was also invaded and colonized by Japan. So I'm sure they also had some English influence in their their culture and they kind of kind of remade that and then came it came to Korea so there's some terms that doesn't make sense in English but we just use it like for instance called game that would be like the mercy roll or cycling hit would be hit for the cycle. We would say four ball instead of a walk or a ball four. And ground home run would be inside the parker.

Dead ball would be hit by pitch. So you have these kind of weird English. Koreans kind of call it Konglish, like Korean English. And also most of the recent sabermetric terms or analytical terms, we haven't really kind of figured out a way how to say them in Korean. So we just use all of them in English. We'll just kind of spell it out phonetically. And Brendan, I know you're fluent in Spanish.

I don't know if you're fluent in baseball Spanish specifically, but what is your perspective on how things work between those two languages? Because obviously English has borrowed some baseball terms from Spanish, so it's sort of a two-way exchange. Yeah, I was just thinking about that. I was thinking about the term buscón, for example, which if you're interested in prospects, that comes up a lot. And one reason you get borrowings is because there's a cultural concept that you don't

have a term at hand to express it. And so you need to borrow it from somewhere else to capture what that is, kind of like Jackie and Kyung Sung are talking about. So it's like, well, you know, buscón is a job or a role within baseball that at least people perceive that it originated in Latin America. And it's not quite a scout and it's not quite a coach and it's not quite, you know, a promoter. It's something sort of in between those things. And so, you know, even people who aren't Spanish speakers use that term. I'm trying to think of other ones that have traveled from Spanish into English.

It's a little bit harder to think of other ones. Yeah, I guess like people talking about referring to a change-up as a cambio or something. That was the one I – yeah, that's just sort of a stylized thing though, right? It's not like we don't have a word for change-up. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking – well, and then there's also like we don't have a word for change up. Yeah, I was thinking, well, and then there's also, like everything, it's very context specific. I mean, you get these regional variations in how people use baseball Spanish too. I remember, I think this is when

Jeff was still on the show, but I remember an episode from a while back where you were talking about, I think Jeff had sort of done a Google translation or a literal translation of an article about baseball in Spanish into English. And I want to say it was from Mexico, but you were talking about some Mexican Spanish terms like chocolates or chocolates for, what was that? Strikeouts, I think. Yeah. And so some of this stuff, it doesn't all necessarily travel from one context to another. Some of it stays specific to specific places where baseball is played. So, Jackie, I guess if anything stood out that you haven't already mentioned about some of the difficulties, words or terms or concepts that you remember sort of struggling to express, I'd be curious about anything that comes to mind. Yeah, I just want to add on to what Hyung-Sung mentioned,

that Japan also borrowed a lot of terms from the United States. And actually, they combined their language with the English terms. And they also make their way to taiwan for for example like japan usually called their batter bata and in taiwan when people play baseball they also refer to the batter as bata and sometimes shortstop japanese i believe they call them shoto. And in Taiwan, we just borrowed it directly from Japan, Japanese baseball culture, shoto. So actually, people consider those kind of usages of these baseball terms to be very Taiwanese. If you as a player, you say those things here in Taiwan when you play ball. So I think it's actually pretty

interesting and you wanted me to say more about the terms yeah okay so like there are so many terms for home run in english and you can replace it with other words very frequently to make sure the text does not sound too repetitive with the same word but in Chinese we only have like two or three different kind of expressions of home runs so sometimes because in MVP machine home runs appears a lot of times and you use a lot of different ways to describe it. And I feel like I also have to do that to make the text read more diverse. So I feel like I have to add in more different ways

to talk about home run, but there's just not many ways to do that. Yeah. I see. And you mentioned in the Facebook group, some other ones like supination and pronation, you know, the movement of the body, you found that to be difficult. And I guess they're referring to Trevor Bauer's penis pull, right? As it was called the equipment that he used to warm up that was sort of mocked when he was the only one using it. So if you're going to translate something like that, then you might have to get creative. Yeah. The supination and pronation thing that you mentioned is difficult because in Chinese, we don't have a direct equivalent of the verb pronate and supinate.

So I have to use a verb phrase or a sentence to describe the motion of pronating and supinating. And as for penis paw and other things that are mentioned in the book. I have to use a more localized way to translate them. And I also find it very difficult to translate expressions like establish your fastball, gain ground, swipe inside of the ball. I think it's already difficult to sort of understand it in English. You have to know, you have to read a lot of baseball and hear a lot of baseball people talk about those ideas to be able to understand them fully. And in Chinese, I think we don't have

it also direct equivalent. I have to use a sentence and I have to add a footnote to explain exactly what establish your fastball means, because it can be very abstract if you directly translate it into Chinese. And I believe I need more explanation for our readers to be able to understand. Jackie, I was going to comment about some of the Japanese borrowings you talked about that have become common in Taiwanese baseball on account of the Japanese colonial history in Taiwan as in Korea. And I was struck by what you said when things like shoto for shortstop or bata for batter,

you said they've become regarded as very Taiwanese things, kind of quintessentially Taiwanese baseball expressions. And I think that's an excellent illustration of just how language circulates and then cultural forms circulate. We use this word circulate in linguistic anthropology to talk about how people are always borrowing these elements of each

other's cultural toolkits, or as we say, their repertoires. And so, you know, after a certain point in time where something originated is almost beside the point, right? Bata is now recognized as an authentically Taiwanese way of talking about baseball. But then I was also thinking about what Hyun Sung said about how the Korean government has a certain language policy for handling borrowings or Koreanizing them. And this is a common story when we think about language and culture. It's kind of the French government with the Académie Française and the effort to make sure that you don't have something that's too English sounding or too anglicized in French. You know, in linguistics, we talk about these different social forces that can destabilize

language use, as when Japan colonizes your country and all of a sudden there's an influx of new practices like baseball and new words like shoto and bata. And then these sort of efforts to stabilize language, you know, if the Korean government tries to insert itself into how people are talking about baseball, they can make that effort. But as Hyun Sung said, it's really hard for these top-down efforts at planning how people should be using language. It's really hard for those efforts to

keep pace with how quickly language and culture are always changing, right? So Hyunsung, I think you said something like, well, we just sort of have to, a lot of the sabermetric terms or the more recent baseball terms, we just kind of have to take those and run with them because the government hasn't even started to consider what the rules are supposed to be. Yeah. Hyunsung, if you want to respond to that, feel free. But I'm also curious about whether you identify with some of what Jackie said, whether some of those challenges that he faced were familiar to you, or whether there are others that come to your mind.

Yeah, getting back to the English use about the language and the terminologies, we do have a way that an average 9th or 10th grader could easily understand. So we'll translate using the Korean words. Korean words. But if you get into the baseball circle, like people in baseball, they will use it in English or some other language. I think it's not only in baseball. In any field, they kind of use other languages to use their terms to make them kind of look better.

So it happens in baseball as well they'll they'll say pitcher they'll say short well this they'll say short instead of shortstop or something or etc and also getting back to some of the difficulties is yeah many of the cue words are very different when I say keywords words it's uh those cues when when let's say in the book there is a lot of conversations going back and forth between a player and a coach right and uh like for instance uh don't fly open like if if I translate word for word what the Korean equivalent would be, it's like hit when you're closed. Like stay back would be leave your center of the body. Or like breakout would be opening your eyes to baseball.

So it goes back to what Jackie mentioned about all those terms he mentioned about. Those were one of the difficulties too. Yeah, and Jackie, I think you mentioned in the Facebook group that the Chinese version of the text ended up being longer than the original. Is that because of the language itself and the differences there? Is it just

because the characters take up more space than the English characters? Why exactly, I guess, does it end up being longer in the translated version? Yeah, I believe when you translate English text into Chinese, the word count will usually increase. I believe that's a very general phenomenon for this kind of English-Chinese translation. And for me, even though my editor has already crammed as many words as he could into one page, it still comes out as a 488 page book um that's not ideal for a publisher because you don't want to sell your reader such a thick book but yeah he has he had already done what he could do to make it as slim as possible so i believe part of is part of reason is because of the natural thing. But another thing is that I add a lot of footnotes

because I think our readers need to know some background knowledge before they start to process the information you provide in the book. And because I believe part of the job as a translator is to help the communication process between the author, the original author, and the Chinese reader. So I want to make it as easy as possible a process for our Chinese readers so that they don't have to read the passage and have to check on Wikipedia and have to look up the video to remind themselves of those information. Because I believe some English readers, they already have the baseball background knowledge to be able to understand some context beforehand. But in Taiwan, our baseball fans might

not be that familiar with Major League Baseball. So I provide a lot of footnotes, and that also contributes to the length of the book. Do you think that will be true about the Korean edition as well, Hyun Sung? I know that the book hasn't been printed yet, so I don't know if you know exactly how long it is, but you must have some sense. Oh, yes. There will be a lot left out, I believe. It happened with my other previous books, translation books. I'm sure the publishers have their limits or costs on building a book. And also, they usually leave out a lot of the cultural references,

especially when it doesn't resonate well with the Korean audiences. I mean, if it's a cultural reference from a show or another book that Koreans are familiar with, they'll leave it in. But most of the case, it's not so. So I don't think that I or Travis gets royalties depending on how well it sells in those markets. But of course, I hope as many people read it and enjoy it as possible. And I'm sure that you have both done the best job possible when it comes to the translation. But I wonder whether you think your editors and publishers were correct in thinking that there would be a market for this. You know, I know that Sabermetrics obviously has made inroads into baseball really everywhere in the world at almost every level. and interest in that topic is in Taiwan, in South Korea, and whether you think the book will be

well received there. So I guess, Jackie, the book has been out already. I wonder whether you've gotten any sense of whether people have enjoyed it. So I don't know the exact number of how many books were sold, but I heard that it has been widely received pretty well. People who have read it think it's a great book, very informative, and many professional baseball players here in the CPBL actually got the book, read the book, and even coaches here actually had the book and read the book i actually talked to one of the coaches from the unit president 7-11 alliance of the cpbl and he is very passionate about the contact and he is also very interested in the latest player development in the United States and also hope that someday the CPPL can also catch up on that and improve on player development.

So I think this MVP machine has made some impact on the Taiwanese baseball cycle. And I think the concepts that it has mentioned will probably influence the people who are working in the baseball circle now in Taiwan and make further change in the future. And our government actually has invested in some, has made some investment in sports science these past two years. And we actually have our own developers who designed some systems like TrackMan or like Rapsodo. And they actually performed pretty well. So in Taiwan, we actually have several researchers who are working on this, and they are also very passionate about this subject. And I believe this book can be a boost to those developments.

That's great to hear. And Hyunsung, what is your sense of whether these concepts have already made their way into the KBO and whether you think there will be any interest in them. They have sabermetrics and analytics and all the techs involved with baseball. They're quite widespread right now. And it's just that there isn't any reference materials or books or reading materials available for them to kind of get that understanding or absorb it to make it their own knowledge. I mean sports books in general over here in Korea it's it's a bit tough because it's

not a big audience but at least you want the whole baseball community to indulge in it. So we're hoping that this book can do that. Hopefully coaches, players, instructors, people in the front office, baseball fans in general would reach out to this book. And I hope that happens. Hyunsung, I was going to ask you first, and then Jackie, if you want to jump in too, kind of about what your perception is of how foreign players or non-Korean, non-Taiwanese, or at least non-Chinese speaking players handle everyday

situations of communication in CPBL and the KBO. So it's funny, before we had this conversation, I was looking back at a series of articles that Sungmin Kim did for Fangraphs a couple years ago, interviewing players like Josh Lindblom about their experience in the KBO and kind of how they adjusted to the food, to the fans, to the culture of baseball, and then also to the challenges of communication. And I think that's, for me, one of the fascinating things about reading these accounts or hearing stories from U.S.-born players who have gone to Venezuela to play for a while. In the United States, there's often an expectation, I think, that we have to accommodate language in only one way, that English has to be accommodated, English speakers have to be accommodated, and there's not really a society-wide expectation for other people to function in a bilingual way outside of specific communities. But when I was reading that, anyway, back to the article about foreign players in the KBO, it was fascinating to read about guys like Lindblom, and I'm trying to think of who the other players in that article were. I think it was Jamie Romack and Tyler Wilson. Yeah,

so they bring up a whole bunch of different things. They bring up the role of translators and interpreters. They bring up using gestures and body language. They bring up Konglish, Hyunsung, as you mentioned before. So I'm just curious to hear from both of you if there's anything you've noticed or anything that stood out to you about how those bilingual situations or those communication challenges look for, especially, I guess, for players from the U.S. who are playing in Korea or Taiwan? Okay, so actually, my master's thesis was something about the roles of staff interpreters in a professional baseball team in Taiwan. And I actually went to the spring training camp of the CTBC brothers last year in 2019 to do this thesis. And I interviewed a lot of players, coaches, and also the foreign players and foreign coaches to ask them about what roles do those

staff interpreters play on their team. And as my research found that those staff interpreters are just indispensable for the foreign players in the CPBL. And they're sort of, sometimes they're sort of like their personal assistants, because not only do they have to interpret for them on the field and during the training they also have to help them call the cab they have to help them order food do a lot of things sometimes if the players relatives their families got sick during midnight and they are just those interpreters are just a phone call away from sending their family members to the hospital. And they also have to deal with a lot of the paperwork that foreign players have to deal with. So I think the process of doing that research really impressed me a lot

because it's a very unique look into the baseball organization and those interpreters even though because of their job they don't really have much personal time but they still they're still very devoted to the job because they love baseball and they form a very deep bond with the coaches or the players that they serve or they help. A very good example is that there is a coach called John Foster in the CPBS Brothers. He was also a former major leaguer, and he served as a pitching coach here in the CTBC Brothers. served as a pitching coach here in the CTBC Brothers and when I interviewed him he mentioned about how deep his bond

is with his interpreter Brian and that bond makes him consider more to stay in Taiwan because his interpreter really becomes one of his family

members or sort of like that. And they have, they share this very deep relationship. So I think for foreign players and foreign coaches in a foreign league, it is very important to form a bond with the local communities and local teammates and local interpreters for them to adjust to the cultures and the baseball environment and working environment. That's what I found in my research. And Sung, did you have anything that you wanted to add about Brendan's question? Yeah, I think the translators over here in the KBO are pretty much the same with Jackie said in terms of what kind of work they have to do and what kind of work they have to deal with trying to kind of take care of the, you know, take care or look after the player. audience in general it's I mean we we're a what you say how much homogenous society we're kind of just one ethnic group and we know that our language is

pretty tough to tough to learn so when when we have a foreign I mean just foreigners in general we have a foreigner we don't really expect them to speak our language we'll try to accommodate them trying to use whatever means whether it's gestures or or broken English we'll try to accommodate them but when they open up and kind of speak one Korean word, everyone just explodes. They'll really love it. Or not just language, but also the culture. If they use chopsticks to eat some Korean food, or if they do a bowing gesture when they meet someone older than them. Or actually, we have a difference.

We have honorifics where there's a difference in how we speak our language to someone older than you or someone younger than you. If they kind of use that with their teammates or fans kind of see that, they love it. So, yeah. Yeah. Brendan, that reminds me of the beginning of your article where the lead was a speech that Hunter Pence gave while he was playing winter ball. And as you noted, it was sort of broken Spanish that he was using. And in some other context, that could have been looked at as derogatory. You know, it would have been looked at as mock Spanish and would have been seen as looking down on the language or the culture in some way.

And yet, in that case, Pence was sort of celebrated for that. And, you know, other players whose first language is English who have maybe learned Spanish even better than Pence has, have really sort of been, you know, fetid for making that effort, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, you know, and that's the term that I use for that in the articles, the paradox of bilingualism, especially within the US, which, you know, like you're saying, Ben, English, monolingual English speaking Americans, or at least those of us who grew up speaking just English, and especially white Americans, I think, kind of get bonus points for even the barest amount of bilingualism or cultural competence, like Hyun Sung was saying. Whereas, you know, players from Latin America, for example, they might receive an approving comment about their English from time

to time, but it's not seen as this totally exceptional thing for someone from Latin America who immigrates to the United States to be able to function in English. It's just kind of expected, right? So there's no bonus points assigned for that. saying about the work of interpreters. And I loved what he said because I think it's a good reminder that interpretation and translation are never just about language. You know, the way he described it, it really is a kind of caring work. And there's a term that some people use for interpretation and translation within linguistics and education, which is language brokering, which reminds us that there's always some kind of negotiation going on when you're crossing these linguistic boundaries. Anyway, that made me think of a conversation with a friend of mine recently, my friend Nick Blue, who's a former minor league player, mentioned, he said, even after Nick grew

up playing baseball in Japan, and he said, you know, even after Ichiro spoke English proficiently, he continued to use an interpreter for contact with the media, which, you know, that in itself demonstrates that interpretation is not just about this kind of bare ability to communicate. It's also about negotiating really challenging, complex, cross-cultural situations and doing so with a certain level of comfort, like Jackie was saying, that makes you feel like you could actually become part of this society or you could become better integrated at least. Well, before we end, I wanted to ask one more question for Hyunsung, which is about Stove

League, one of my favorite topics of this year. I've recommended the Korean baseball drama many times this year, and I still get the sense that not every Effectively Wild listener has watched Stove League yet, which is unacceptable. I'm still trying to get Meg to watch it. I know that she will. I think that she'll like it, but we traded some emails about it earlier this year, and I know you liked it too so i wonder if you could just uh give it your endorsement and maybe talk a little bit about how closely you think it came to capturing kbo and how accurate it was and also i guess how popular it was in your country oh yeah stove league was um it it's a TV drama that was aired actually last year around this I mean, he's been a experiences to build this team.

And what I heard from, this was from an article, is that most of the episodes were based on actual events. So the accuracy is pretty much there. And it was very interesting because they just focused on what goes on in the front office. I particularly didn't really like the baseball scenes. It was a bit awkward. They're just average. Yeah, that's often a problem. And it kind of reminded me of shows like Rome,

like the HBO show Rome, or Game of Thrones in the earlier seasons where they didn't show much battle. It's more the politics going on between people. And I think that was the most interesting part for me. And it was really popular. I mean, it won awards. It was like the best drama at the annual award show.

I mean, in the beginning, people were kind of worried because we did have a few baseball shows before that really failed terribly. And yeah, there weren't actually there weren't many expectations in the beginning. Then it became really popular well i think it's great it's a great baseball show but also just a great show period i think it's available in some markets on netflix but i think not in the u.s but you can watch it on vicky the streaming service which i will link to and you can get a free trial and just binge the whole thing. It's very easy. I did it and enjoyed it, and I think it's great off-season content anything any of you want to add, please do, but I will also link to Brendan's article. I will link to where you can buy Jackie's work, the translated version, if you are in the market or know someone who is, and I'll link to Jackie's

blog as well. So I'm really grateful that you two were the ones doing this. I can't imagine that there would have been anyone better suited to bringing the book to these languages. And I'm really happy that you devoted such time and attention to it and brought such expertise to the project. So if anyone wants to add anything else or plug anything else, please do. But I'm really happy that we could get you all together today. Yeah, thank you. It's because of your works that make me really interesting writing loan baseball articles. Well, thank you very much for coming on. And thank you,

Hyunsung, as well. Thank you for having me. And Brendan, thanks for joining us, too. Yeah, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks, Ben. And thanks, Hyunsung and Jackie. Wonderful to meet you all and to get to chat about baseball language. All right, that will do it for today and for this week. Thanks, as always, for listening. And I hope you all enjoyed this conversation as much as I did.

It's always a pleasure for me when we can connect to people all around the world who share this bond of baseball. It is kind of a common language in one sense, even if it's not literally the same language. I'm still hoping for a second season of Stove League, but season one was pretty perfect, so it doesn't really require a second season. I just miss the show. But if you haven't seen season one, then you have plenty of Stove League still ahead of you. I will repeat my plea for you all to check it out. I suppose I would be remiss if I did not mention that the MVP machine makes a nice stocking stuffer, especially in the paperback edition, whichever language you choose to read it in. You can also support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Elisa Gale, Linus Marko, Brian Strauss, Scott Kramer, and Gus. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastoffangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. If you're celebrating Christmas, I hope you have a merry one. If you're not, I still hope you have

a nice December 25th. We will be back with more episodes next week before the end of the year, so we hope you have a wonderful rest of this week and weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. You're the chameleon That's the word I'm changing colors in the midday sun