Photo: Courtesy of Julie Kleeman

By Michael Gold

Us journalists and writers handle a lot of words on a daily basis, but even the longest, most exhaustive tome can't hold a candle to the veritable word colossus that is the new Oxford Chinese Dictionary (OCD), due out this month in bookstores worldwide. The largest, most comprehensive bilingual English-Chinese dictionary ever produced, the OCD appears poised to usher in a new era of translation, linguistics and reference between China and the West as the two universes merge ever closer. For most of us, it will be something we will likely end up taking for granted in our everyday study and use of Chinese. For OCD editor-in-chief, public face and bona-fide word maestro Julie Kleeman, the dictionary is the capstone of five years' work in a field that is at once diverse yet repetitive, intellectual yet technical, highly esoteric yet eminently indispensable.

Unorthodox 

Sitting down for a chat near her central Beijing apartment, Kleeman appears far younger than her 35 years. Sporting a laid-back, casual demeanor and huge shock of curly brown hair, Kleeman breaks into wild peals of laughter at various points during our conversation, throughout which she sings the praises of the OCD while never shying away from discussions of her varied and unorthodox career.

"Even though I was the first editor to be brought onto the project, when I first got involved it wasn't really clear to me what the finished dictionary would look like," she says. "I was just focused on revising my batch of words, on the minutiae of it all."

Though technically beginning her work on the dictionary in November 2005, it wasn't until January 2007 that Kleeman was named head of the native English side, after the project was officially launched in a Beijing-based training session that brought together all the various players, from the administrative hands at Oxford University Press (OUP) to the over 60 freelance editors and translators.

"My general duties were to check the translations provided by the sub-editors," Kleeman says, shrugging off questions about the enormity of a task that would eventually result in a mind-blowing 300,000 individual entries. "I get that question a lot, but I never had that issue; I guess if you were the kind of person who would go mad with too many words you wouldn't do this kind of job."

To be sure, the fact that many of her editorial decisions were based on her personal judgment of the flow, essence and meaning of the translation, as opposed to simple cross-checking with other dictionaries, alleviated the rote, workaday quality of job. "There's a hunch you can get from looking at a translation, if it captures a good sense of the English - even if you are not familiar with the Chinese side of the term," she says.

As one of only two editors (including her native Chinese counterpart) to have read over every last entry in the dictionary, her overlords at OUP certainly had faith in her Chinese-language skills, though Kleeman says she'd hardly describe herself as exponentially more fluent than any other foreigner whose life has revolved around China as much as Kleeman's has. First arriving in China as a teenager in the early 1990s, Kleeman, a London native, found a natural kinship with the way of life here, so much so that she decided to take on Chinese language as her major at Cambridge, where she says the pedagogical style was far different than the trends she's noticed in more recent years.

"It was a lot of drills, memorization and testing, with nothing interdisciplinary at all … it really wasn't very fun," she says, explaining how seemingly minute aspects like proper stroke direction and order took on an outsized influence in her curriculum. "I remember the first thing I did when I started was buy a magnifying glass so I could count the strokes correctly!"

Solid path 

Kleeman remains grateful to her alma mater, though, for setting her on a path of solid Chinese proficiency, one that would see her work in China in various capacities over the years, including as a documentary producer, a consultant for an HIV/AIDS NGO, a Chinese media watchdog of sorts and an editor on various other bilingual dictionaries. What sets her latest stint with OUP apart, however, is just how crucial she believes this dictionary will be in the overall canon of translation materials.

"This dictionary represents the first time that every entry has been updated to reflect the most modern and current usage of both English and Chinese as it is spoken today," she says.  "This means that every example we provide has to be culled from other media - books, newspapers, etc - and not just from the editor's head."

Kleeman also stressed the importance of usage clarification as part of the OCD's MO - going beyond simply listing different possible translations for a given word, without differentiating when those different translations might be applicable, as other dictionaries do.

"Say there was just one possible meaning in English, you would just have one translation in Chinese," Kleeman says. "But take 'pulp,' for example: you've got pulp of fruit, pulp of a tooth, pulp like trashy books, pulp as in crushed mass, wood pulp, to mash into a pulp - if there's going to be a variance in how a word might be used, we provide a phrase or example that shows the exception, otherwise the user should assume that any translation is valid in all contexts."

It all does start to feel a bit tautological after a while - almost stiflingly so for those of us who just need to know how to order at a restaurant, negotiate for an apartment or follow the latest news on CCTV. But without projects like Kleeman's, which she says will continue to occupy her time for the foreseeable future as OUP prepares various spin-offs to the main volume, the entire discipline of English-Chinese translation would grind to a halt - and with it, every last shred of correspondence between the two worlds, from the most superficial conversation between friends to the highest-level dialogue between businesspeople, diplomats and presidents.