It came to the attention of the folks at the City of Vancouver recently that when they tried to engage ethnic communities in making Vancouver the greenest city in the world, sometimes they were not speaking their language. Literally.
Words like “footprint,” “local food” and “resilience” didn’t translate well into Mandarin and Cantonese. Translated, they lacked the cultural heft they had in North America. Local food? Is that something you buy at the neighbourhood Safeway?
The problem: How do you make Vancouver the greenest city in the world when a huge chunk of its population has no idea what you’re talking about? The city would have to find a better way of communicating its environmental message to its sizable, and growing, immigrant population.
In May of last year, the city and the University of B.C. signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly develop their sustainability goals, and as part of that agreement, 10 UBC students were assigned to study different areas of the initiative.
One of the students was Maggie Wang. Wang, 41, is studying for her master’s at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning.
Originally from Beijing, she has been in Canada for three years and is now a landed immigrant. She has two daughters -one with her here, and one in China, where her husband is.
She hopes to resettle the entire family here.
She’s now working with the city.
“My goal as part of the initiative,” Wang said, “is to improve the environmental awareness of the Chinese community, and to get the Chinese people involved in the Green City initiative.”
Wang grew up in Qinghai province, one of the more remote and undeveloped parts of China. Her father was a forester, and she grew up with a passion for nature.
“My immediate impression is that the environmental awareness of the [recent] Chinese community is there … and before they moved to Canada, there was a lot of concern about the environment and about pollution. That’s why many move here.”
But when they’re here, they don’t see the environmental problems. The sky is clean and everything looks so good.
“Particularly for the new Chinese, Canada is livable and is here to enjoy.”
This is not to imply, Wang said, that recent immigrants and the Chinese community lack environmental awareness. The Chinese culture has a millennia-old love of nature, with a very strong narrative running through Confucianism and Taoism.
But China’s rapid modernization has strained the new generation’s connection to that narrative.
“There’s a kind of disconnect between the recent development in China and the traditional belief in respect for nature. But in Canada, there’s actually a better ground for those traditional connections to come alive here.
“So if we want to bring the Chinese community on board, we have to be more communicative.”
The city and UBC aren’t the only organizations trying to make the sustainability issue more culturally inclusive.
The David Suzuki Foundation’s climate change team now has an outreach component to ethnic communities. And retired pediatrician Dr. Joseph Lin, founder of The Green Club, has conducted eco-tours and nature walks in Metro Vancouver since the early 1990s for the Chinese community. Lin writes an environmental column for several Chinese language newspapers and co-hosts a weekly radio program on environmental issues.
One of the more diverse groups to emerge is the memorably named RangiChangi Roots: Many Cultures, One Climate. (“RangiChangi” is Nepalese for “colourful” and “diverse.”) Formerly known as the Intercultural Alliance for Climate Action, RangiChangi is now a non-profit with the aim of creating a sustainability dialogue across Metro Vancouver’s ethnic communities. Among its organizers are Latinos, Filipinos, South Asians and Chinese.
“We felt there was a [cultural] gap …” said Kate Castelo, cofounder of RangiChangi, ” … in that the environmental movement was unicultural -white, middle and upper-middle class, university educated. So we decided we’d like to champion the ethno-cultural environmental communities.”
Its first organized event, in March of last year, was entitled “Green Is More Than Just White” and -appropriate to the group’s ethnic aim -was held in the Vallarta Grill, a Mexican restaurant in Gastown.
Speakers included Claudia Li, founder of Shark Truth, a local group formed to stop the harvesting of sharks for shark fin soup, and Preet Bal, who with her sister Poonam Sandhu, started a successful campaign to introduce recycling bins at local Vaisakhi events.
The next initiative Rangi Changi hopes to complete brings this column back to problem of language: It wants to publish a dictionary of environmental terms “in at least three languages,” Castelo said, so nothing gets lost in the translation.
pmcmartin@vancouversun.com
I would like to suggest that Chinese language actually translates well in the “green” language.
For example, “sustainable” in Chinese is translated into 可持續發展
which literally means development that can be continued.
“renewable energy” is 可再生能源
which actually means energy that can be reborn.
Contrary to what Pete McMartin said in his column, the Chinese language on sustainable initative is often a lot more colourful and creative than the English equivalent. Take the English word “sustainable” as an example, it tend to lack movement, it tends to tell people to stay where we are, which doesn’t excite. But the Chinese equivalent, which includes moving ahead, moving forward while includes continuity is more exciting. Not to mention renewable energy as born again energy in Chinese. How great is it and how creative the term of translation is ?!And what is more, these are well used terms in the Chinese communities in China,Canada and elsewhere.
To suggest ‘Carbon Footprint” does not mean as much in Chinese is simply wrong. Carbon Footprint in Chinese is 碳足跡. It means exactly the same in English and it is graphic in Chinese because you can literally see the footprint in “carbon” – black colour, the colour of coal.
Anyone can check this out by simply clicking on Google Translate.
I think for the ” new environmental movement” to truely mean it when we use terms like “inclusive,” it is key for us to do some serious education first. That means before we suggest new Canadians are laggards in the green initative , we better first do some serious homework ourselves. The last time I checked, the bulk of public transit users are not white, but multi-coloured, if you will.
I heard one of Pete McMartin’s questions to Kate Castello from RangiChangi Roots is “how do you make the rich Chinese stop driving their big SUVs?” Well Pete, when we say “Green is more than White,” we also mean “Laggards are more than Yellow!” The rich will be driving their big SUVs for a long long time until they cannot afford it or until they get a moment of enlightment. And when I say “the rich” I mean every colour and creed!!