Translation?

Going through my drafts and doing some editing as I go to get stuff scheduled, make sure I really do start posting again. The Chinese quote is something I saw on August 27, 2013, for reference. (That was my 21st birthday, here is what I published that day.)

每个人想要的成功或许不同。

I saw that as someone's background for their laptop on the train to the airport to orientation for my study abroad program almost a year ago (omg.) I've actually got a tag for things about China/Chinese, and another for things that are in Chinese

Anyways, this was translated as "Different people value success differently." Which is true. It's not exactly how I would translate it- my understanding is that this is about what people think success means more than how they feel about success, but it works. [I am not saying the translation is bad or wrong. The meaning I think the original is saying is one of the meanings the translation can have, it just seems easier to get a different reading from it than the one that I think is intended. Translation is subjective, and it's definitely easier to translate into one's native language than out of it.] I'd have translated it to "Different people have different ideas of what success is."

There's a couple directions I could have been going from there [I wrote down to the end of the last paragraph on the train on August 27, 2013, and I'm writing this on November 5, 2013, so I'm not sure which way I was going to go.]

I could talk about how translating stuff is complicated and interesting. It is. Translation isn't a word for word deal, and I've run into this a few times since. I saw someone say that the social model of disability didn't translate properly into Chinese because one of the sentences that's apparently fundamental to the English version, “Disability is a social issue” or something of the sort, doesn't translate well. The translation I think of, and the one thought of by the person claiming this, is more along the lines of disability being a social problem, or a burden on society. That's kind of the opposite of what we want to say.

残疾是社会问题 is the translation I think they were thinking of, by the way. And honestly... the reading implied by that is one you can get out of the English version too, which is part of why I don't actually use that as my first explaining sentence for the social model.

Also, this is translation! We can be creative! In fact, we should be creative. Telling Chinese people with disabilities which model they should use to look at disability (or even assuming that their views will fit any of the main USA models) is a problem, and I'm not going to do that. But I'm also not going to say an idea can't be translated, especially when it's just not so. 

“残疾人最严重的问题并不是从自己的（障碍？残疾？身体？）来的，而是从社会的障碍来的。”

There. All I had to do was take a different core-ish sentence describing the social model of disability and see if it translated better. The one I went for was “The worst problems Disabled people face don't come from our own impairments, but from society's barriers.” That's a sentence I'm more likely to use introducing the ideas of the social model in English than “Disability is a social issue” anyways.

In the end, translation is... I've been told it's like a dance between the translator and the original author. Let's just say there's a reason that anything of mine that gets translated into a language I speak (English to Chinese is the only example that seems likely, though I suppose that Chinese to English is possible since when I write in Chinese I don't normally do it by writing in English and then translating into Chinese,) I want to be heavily involved in the translation to make sure that the ideas come through properly. I don't mind if the words get messed up a bit, or even if whole sentences get lost, but the ideas need to be the same.

Oh, and that's why I'm slightly mistrustful of the English version of “The Reason I Jump.” The translator and the author almost certainly have extremely different views of autism- one is a parent, and one lives in an autistic mind-body, and I'm aware of how basic worldview differences between translator and author can lead to differences between the translation and the original.

Growing up into an Autistic adult

This is in the Down Wit Dat August 2014 Blog Hop, BTW. The theme is about how disabilities and such are a natural part of life. 

Well, at this point I'm 21, almost 22, so I'm definitely already an adult. I've been working part-time in math education since I was 17, almost 18, and I've done some other kinds of work (research, information technology, physics lab TA.) Also I just read Mel Bagg's What Not Changing Us Means.

When we say we don’t want to change, we’re incorporating all four dimensions in life already. We’re incorporating growth through time into our concept of the thing we don’t want changed. We’re saying “We don’t want to be changed” in the same way that a cat, faced with becoming a dog, would say “I don’t want to be changed.” The cat isn’t denying the important passage from kittenhood to adulthood. The cat is saying I want to grow as a cat, not a dog.

Basically this. (I mean a lot of other things, too, I really do suggest that you read sier post in addition to mine, or even that you read sier post first since a lot of what I'm doing here is responding or building or putting on some of the specifics as it applies to my growing up into an autistic adult, rather than a non-autistic adult.)

But also the responses. A recent New York Times article that I am not going to give the honor of linking because it is terrible (it thinks early intervention leading to a child losing their diagnosis is 1) good, and 2) going to last.)

Basically, it works under the idea that an autistic child growing up into a non-autistic adult is a good thing, which is a social and cultural and otherwise made by non-autistic "experts" assumption about how autistic people should live sort of assumption. It also works under the idea that if you can reach this sort of indistinguishability once, it will last. That's not accurate, BTW. Neurodivergent K talks about that in The tyranny of indistinguishability: performance better than I could, the essential point is that as demands increase the effort needed to emulate them increases and gets even further from autistic needs.

But because autistic development and non-autistic development look different, are moving towards different... slightly closer to stable than in childhood but still always changing adult areas, and because people tend to expect non-autistic development of autistic people rather than admitting cluelessness, there's an idea that we will get less obvious as we grow up when the opposite is more likely to be true.

Back to Mel's words and the cat/dog metaphor for one way that it works:

Quite frequently when they say that they sneak in something about making us into dogs, only they call that part of the growth from kittenhood into adulthood. “Sure, learn about stalking mice and stuff, I’ll give you that, as compromise or something, but hey, wag your tail when you’re happy, not when you’re mad. That’s the right way after all. You can’t deny change. Didn’t I just talk about important skills of the adult dog… er… I mean cat?”

 Don't flap your hands, it's silly/childish. Make eye contact. Use oral speech. Sit still. These are things expected for non-autistic development in the culture of my particular bit of the USA. (Eye contact expectations are hugely variable with culture. Signed languages have a long history, and they have been an acceptable alternative that most people know in quite a few places, for quite a few reasons.)

Because of how widespread those expectations are, I actually did learn to do a lot of that (iffily, badly, actually pretty easy to distinguish from my peers even though I've always, always, even still meet the definition of indistinguishable that Lovaas and co use: placement in a general educational classroom and at least one non-disabled friend, and can we talk about how this definition depends on the person still being a student?)

But.
In growing up into an autistic adult, I've stopped doing some of those things. I've started using the skills that I need for navigating the world as I am, rather than for trying to navigate the world while pretending to be non-autistic. (By Mel's metaphor, I've started switching out "adult dog" skills taught to me as universal "adult" skills for "adult cat" skills that serve my actual needs.)

I carry an AAC device- in my case, either my laptop with eSpeak or my iPad with Proloquo2Text (or just a notepad application when I was in China because I never figured out a Chinese text to speech on the iPad.) I have one of these things and a pen and paper on my person pretty much all the time. A side effect of knowing that I'm covered even if oral speech does give out on me, funnily enough, is that I'm more likely to retain the ability to speak, but that's not actually the purpose of carrying the devices. The reason is that I'm not always able to speak orally, and it's important for me to have a way to be understood even when I can't. My autistic body language, while very communicative for people who understand it, isn't reliable for this because people tend not to understand it. Folks have a tendency not to realize I'm upset or uncomfortable until I've actually melted down, which is too late as far as I'm concerned.

I carry a stim toy, a fidget, whatever you want to call it. It's usually a Tangle, Buckyballs, or a square of satin-bound blanket. Any one of these can take care of my need to be not-still. I've also used knitting and making chain mail for this (the armor kind, not the junk mail kind.) When I'm taking care of my need to be not-still in one of these ways, I'm less likely to pick at my skin, which means my face itches less. That's actually a big enough thing that once I realized the effect was there, it got added to my list of purposes for carrying a stim toy. [As opposed to being more likely to retain speech, which I don't care all that much about.] The original reason was being better able to center myself and also better able to concentrate on whatever I want to concentrate on, which has tended to be school stuff.

I don't dress like most people. I tend to go for either T-shirts and athletic shorts (both out of the mens section) or homemade dresses and skirts. In the case of skirts, the shirt might be homemade too, or it might be a T-shirt. The common factor is comfort- I'm talking about cotton knit dresses, the kind of dress people think of as for kids because adults use more "mature" and not-stretchy fabrics that aren't as comfortable and harder to keep clean. Don't even get me started on stockings. I have refused to wear them for as long as I have been able to enforce this refusal. Actually longer but until I turned 18 I could sometimes be overruled by a parent and that was terrible.

I flap and rock and spin and jump more openly now at 21 than I did at 12. At 12, I was still simultaneously trying to get my weirds read as deliberate and trying to be more typical, more indistinguishable, than is anywhere near sustainable for me to be. At 21, I know that while the "make it look like deliberate weirdness" carries some benefits, it also means people are better able to ask me to change it, which doesn't go well because I really can't. Not sustainably, anyways. I also know that trying to act like a non-autistic adult super-duper not sustainable. That's kind of the reason behind "I really can't" on the changing said weirdnesses.

People tend not to read me as autistic anyways, because autistic... adult? Does not compute. Autistic person with college degree? Does not compute. Autistic person... as the teacher? Computes even less. Autistic person... read as woman? What? That can't be a thing. And yet... here I am. Here we are, I should say, because it's not all that unusual. Fairly sure all those things apply to Neurodivergent K, for one example. Melanie Yeargeau for another. Ibby Grace, too.

But people not attaching the word autistic to the pretty noticeable differences?

1) Doesn't make the differences stop being a thing. I jump, rock, flap, spin, openly stim, etc. I've had at least three broken bones, none of which got diagnosed at the time and one of which was very explicitly a non-diagnosis due to my not acting like I was in enough pain- I went hiking on a broken foot without realizing it was broken. I use language weirdly. I ran a 5k barefoot once. My records are fairly littered with autistic traits that didn't get called that, which means that I had the differences and that they got noticed.

2) Doesn't mean they didn't notice the differences.  R****d was my bullies insult of choice fairly often, and definitely the one they went for when I was jumping and flapping my hands. Crazy and weird were the two "negative" words that anyone had to say about me in high school. One of my college professors commented that I speak in a "unique" way. Chad Stokes (State Radio, Dispatch) still remembers me as the person who ran the 5k barefoot.

3) Definitely doesn't make me somehow not autistic. Seriously, I have no idea how the idea of "If we don't say the word then she doesn't have it" is supposed to work, but something along those lines seems to have been the philosophy that made it take so long for me to get diagnosed. But yeah. In terms of stuff I do in my life, both online and off, I probably do count as that ideal result because I'm in general education classrooms and have friends. The reason I can do those things is that I don't try to act like I'm non-autistic. My classmates and teachers from my year in Tianjin can totally attest to just how obviously autistic I am. So calling "doing stuff as an adult" the same as "not autistic anymore" (in metaphor, calling "adult" the same as "adult dog") makes zero sense. Actually negative sense.

I'm an Autistic adult doing things. Not a magically-not-autistic-anymore adult because I am doing things. Seriously. Should. Not. Be. That. Hard. To. Accept.

One Reading Suggestion

I don't know how many of you actually read through that whole list of things I either cited or made notecards for about the erasure of queer autistic people, and that was so long ago that you probably wouldn't remember if you had... but there is one person where I cited seven of her articles. Those were part of a series called Double Rainbow, and I really, really suggest reading the series. For once, I'd even say read the comments- most of the commenters are Autistic people who get it, so far as I can tell. There are some exceptions, one of whom I cited as contributing to the erasure of Queer Autistic people, but mostly it was good.

Anyways. Heads up for a quote from that bad comment, because I'm handing over the notecard I got out of it.

Java Junkie claims that “Your critique of this fact makes me wonder if you realized you were reading a book about autism instead of gender identity.” despite the blog series being specifically devoted to the intersection of autism, gender, and sexuality, and argues that “Sexual identity is much to complex of an issue (ESPECIALLY for autistics) to address it more in depth than they did in a book that's meant as a general overview.” In doing so, she says that Queer Autistic people are too complex to address.

The fact in question is that parent guides were really bad on the subject of gender. They told parents to make their daughters do gender normative stuff. [Shaving legs and pits for girls was on this list.] Which, I understand that this is socially expected, and I can totally understand explaining to folks that it is (now try to explain why it's expected, good luck coming up with anything other than sexist nonsense because you can't.) What's not OK is making someone do it. We have the same right to knowingly go against norms everyone else does, even if/when a little extra checking in to make sure it's knowingly sounds like a good idea.

It's not that much more complex to say "Make sure kid understands what's expected and that if they don't do it some folks will use that as an excuse to be terrible, then let them chose." It's especially not that much more complex once you get into the question of "How would I make kid do the thing, anyways?" We think it's more complex because there's assumptions that "Tell kid what to do" and "Do socially expected things" are simpler, in this case the socially expected things being gender conformity, but... it's really not? The perceived simplicity is artificial, since attempting to keep up with gender norms is actually really complicated.

Anyways, assuming that "wants to write about a thing" leads to "actually writes about a thing" (meh, see the month long absence when I tried to convince myself the next thing I would write about would really be Li Jinsheng,) I will eventually talk about some other sources I cited in my paper that I think are good to read. Also, the paper is now a chapter in Criptiques. 

On Knowing

There are parents, apparently, who don't tell their autistic children about the diagnosis because they are afraid their children will be bullied. That's not going to work, and depriving people of useful knowledge about themselves in a failed attempt to protect them from something else is just a really bad idea.

I understand the fear of being bullied. I really do. I was bullied, as a kid. A lot. Not as continuously or as obviously or as physically as, say, Neurodivergent K, but I was bullied. All through third grade, there was a pair of kids who would spend the entirety of chorus meetings using my literalism and dislike for errors against me and then call me ret*rded. They would step on my feet when they had the chance, too.
A teacher actually hit me with a book that year, too, because I was clumsy and hit my head on the slanted ceiling every day.

Everyone made fun of me for my really, really bad hiccups too. They'd insist that my hiccups making my jump was a purposeful thing "for attention" as opposed to something that... well, hiccups still sometimes make me jump. Part of that is my startle reflex, also a target for the bullies, and part of that is that the diaphragm is a strong muscle! Also my medical history does include a rare thing where the other people with it got really bad hiccups. Like, this is not me trying to get attention. There are better methods, like doing algebra at you while being nine. Hiccups just suck.

Here's the thing: this wasn't the result of me knowing I'm autistic. It wasn't the result of my parents knowing I'm autistic. It wasn't the result of my teachers knowing I'm autistic. It wasn't the result of my classmates knowing I'm autistic. I know this for a very simple reason: No one knew I was autistic. No one. Didn't stop the bullies.

Things actually got better once people knew, particularly once I knew but really it was people in general. My classmates this year were supportive and told me things like "My presentation has a video in it, bring headphones to class just in case" ahead of time. My teachers were supportive and told me things like "Email what you wrote to me after class" when speech goes kaput and I start typing instead, but don't actually ask a classmate to read it aloud for me.

Not everyone will be that good (they should be, but they won't) when there is a label. But the fact is, autistic people get bullied in ridiculously high numbers because people can tell we're different and decide that's an acceptable thing to prey on. That happens with or without an official label for the way that we're different. The label and the lack of a label can both be used as excuses for the bullying and the general terribleness, but neither is the actual problem. Telling us that we're autistic isn't going to make the bullying worse. (If our teachers are sufficiently terrible, telling them might make it worse, but telling us? No. That won't make it worse.)

Back, I hope.

So it's been a month. I think that's the longest time I've gone without posting since I made this blog. And this isn't super-duper much of a post, either, really. I made a word of the day for a language exchange I'm in- in the absence of actual Chinese people in the group, I'm the best Chinese speaker/writer they've got for the time being, and that means I'm in the rotation for making words of the day and helping other folks learn.

Which feels weird. But the Chinese government is trying really hard to get more people learning Chinese, and when I meet folks whose first language is Mandarin Chinese and they realize I speak, they tend to be excited (iffy on happening, because I'm not going to go up to someone and randomly start speaking Chinese outside China, but if I hear folks sounding lost and speaking Mandarin, I'll help in Chinese assuming I'm not lost too.)

Anyways, without further ado, here's the word of the day I prepared. Maybe it'll even get me back in the habit of posting here.

Chinese Word of the Day- Day 15.

Image description: The five elements are in a circle, clockwise from the top are wood in blue, fire in red, earth in yellow, metal in white, and water in black. Each element has a relationship arrow pointing towards the next element clockwise and the second element clockwise, which isn't labeled in the picture. The one position clockwise relationship is a creation relation, while two positions is a destruction one, eg, water quenches fire.

Chinese- 五 (wǔ)

English- Five

The exact origins of this character aren't entirely certain: some scholars wonder if it may have originated as horizontal bars and then changed over time much as other characters did, while others think it began as two horizontal bars with an X between them. (Considering how long it was before characters were standardized, they may both be correct.)

五, sometimes written as 伍 in more formal contexts, such as on the 5-dime (五毛 wǔ máo) coin, is a culturally relevant number, as there were traditionally five elements: wood (木 mù), fire (火 huǒ), earth (土 tǔ), metal (金 jīn), and water (水 shuǐ).

When tallying to five (五, wǔ) Chinese people typically use the character 正 (zhèng.)

EXAMPLES

五块 - wǔ kuài, five bucks, five dollars. It's less formal than 五元 - wǔ yuán, which has the same essential meaning.

五毛 - wǔmáo, five dimes, fifty cents.

五分钟 - wǔ fēnzhōng, five minutes

五行 - wŭ xíng, the Five Elements

你家有几个人？ Nǐ jiā yǒu jǐ gèrén? How many people are in your family?

我家有五个人。Wǒjiā yǒu wǔ gèrén. My family has five people.