Services
Translation Services
Annotated Historical Translation
The sensitive translation of historical texts, including old letters, account books, newspaper articles, and gravestone or temple-plaque inscriptions. Added explanatory annotations serve to highlight information of relevance that may be less than apparent from the base translation, such as the actual location of a named place; the name by which a person was known in English; an equivalent date on the Gregorian calendar; or an important implication of the original wording.
Literary Translation
The translation of literature and poetry in a manner that strives to preserve the sense, style and literary quality of the original.
Transcription
The transcription into a readable or searchable electronic form of an original text that may be written cursively, be partially mutilated, or employ pre-modern abbreviations or character forms.
Newspaper-archive Research
Searching for information of relevance to a client (for example, articles that relate to a specific person or firm) within Chinese-language-newspaper archives, such as the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive, and electronic archives of Singaporean, Canadian, Hong Kong, and late-Qing and early-Republican newspapers. This work often depends on knowing what search terms to use, which is in turn informed by familiarity with the language of the day, and knowing how characters corrupt when scanned by optical-character-recognition software.
Summarisation of Key Content
This is a less labour-intensive alternative to a carefully-fashioned translation, and is particularly well-suited to sets of texts, such as family letters or interrelated newspaper articles.
Family-history Research
Ely’s knowledge of historical language and obscure resources has proved invaluable in supporting the work of professional genealogists and private family-history researchers.
Examples
Annotated Historical Translation Example
Chinese section, Carlyle Cemetery, Rutherglen, Victoria; photograph by Paul Macgregor 2016.
The translation of inscriptions on old Chinese gravestones
The translation of inscriptions on old Chinese gravestones is a common commission type. While such inscriptions are generally short, the work requires a strong knowledge of such things as traditional calendrical and naming systems, as well as familiarity with idiomatic approaches to place naming, and with place-name changes. This example was produced for Dr. Juanita Kwok, and forms an appendix to her doctoral thesis on the Chinese history of Bathurst, New South Wales: The Chinese in Bathurst: Recovering Forgotten Histories.
Literary Translation Example
Inscription on the lid of the red-sandalwood box that is the subject of the example document.
The translation of traditional Chinese poetry
This is an example of heavily annotated nuanced literary translation, which serves the dual purposes of sensitively reflecting and clearly explicating a sophisticated source text. The client in this case was an auction house (Leonard Joel), but such work has also been commissioned by museums, collectors, and family-history researchers.
Poetry has played a large role in the Chinese-speaking world, conversance with its corpus and the art of its composition being deemed an essential attainment for the traditionally educated scholar. The translator’s approach to its translation is founded on a competent knowledge of its rules of prosody; the literary corpus on which it draws both directly and allusively; Chinese culture and history; as well as strong native familiarity with English, the norms that govern its poetic forms, and a love of the written word in general. It is an approach that he would hope others would deem to be rigorous and yet not uninspired.
Transcription Example
Page from a Fong Lee store account book, Oxley Museum, Wellington, NSW; photograph by Paul Macgregor 2021.
The transcription of account-book entries
This example is a transcription from an old grocery ledger, which forms part of the collection of Bendigo’s Golden Dragon Museum. The figures in it are expressed in Chinese digits (a.k.a. Suzhou numerals), accompanied by the unique symbols that were once used with them for bookkeeping in pre-decimal British currency. Some of the text is written cursively or in a shorthand fashion, and southern Chinese vernacularisms and regional variant characters are employed. Chinese digits, which were gradually replaced by Arabic numerals in the 20th century, are a speciality of the translator, as are historical southern Chinese vernaculars.
Newspaper-archive Research and Summarisation of Key Content Example
Captioned group photograph on page 3 of Sydney’s Chinese Australian Herald for Saturday 13th April 1907 (see https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/168794703); image courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales.
The identification and summarisation of information in Australia’s old Chinese-language newspapers
This example is the product of the more consultative type of services that Ely provides—research and summarisation. It is an overview, produced for the Chinese Australian Historical Society, of content in Australia’s early Chinese-language newspapers that relates to the historically significant Sydney firm of Kwong War Chong and the family associated therewith.
Family-history Research Example
Photograph on display at “Linlu Villa” in the See Yip region’s Majianglong Village Complex, which presumably shows the member of the Mexican Chinese diaspora responsible for building the villa in 1936, and his family.
The translation of documents from family archives
Ely is not presently at liberty to share examples of his genealogical research; however, he can share an example of the translation of a document from a family archive. He has undertaken a number of translations and summarisations of such documents to support family-history research, tailoring them to the needs of his clients. Ely considers it a privilege to be entrusted with material of this personal nature. The example linked below, which is one of Ely’s early works, is a transcription and translation of a biographical account written by the paternal grandfather of celebrated Australian journalist, author and speaker Helene Chung Martin.
Banner image: gold-rush-era Chinese name plaque, which was found under a shed at Wandiligong, and is on display at the Bright Museum, 10 Railway Avenue, Bright, Victoria; photograph by Ely Finch 2020.