For a company dealing with medicine and chemistry, we have translated, into Chinese, a calendar of popular beliefs and superstitions. The issue of the Calendar was intended to mark the coming of the New Year. Along with traditional Russian and Chinese beliefs, it also contained “modern” superstitions connected with cars and computers.
Among the activities of the company is the veterinary medicine; therefore, it was quite natural to find, in the Calendar prepared by employees of the company, the
belief about a black cat walking across the street or about a stork making a nest on the roof. However, the legend of a fly falling into the soup is not so widely known (If a fly falls into your soup, you should expect a gift soon).
It was interesting to get to know some
Chinese superstitions. Thus, for example, the Chinese have a dislike for the
figure of 4. This is because the word “four” in Chinese is consonant with the word “death”. Therefore, elevators in some buildings in
China do not even have buttons for the 4th and the 14th floor. This information would be interesting, first of all, for Russian readers; however, upon the customer’s request, we translated it into
Chinese, too.
A more modern
superstition of birds’ droppings on the surface of a car was also translated from Russian into Chinese. There is a belief that bird dung on a car brings money, and if you wash it away, you will surely encounter unexpected expenditures. However, it is hardly likely that our ancestors had this superstition.
Quite a number of such beliefs, superstitions, and also descriptions of national holidays were translated by our agency from Russian into Chinese to make the Chinese familiar with peculiarities of the Russian mentality, which is, of course, reflected, inter alia, in people’s beliefs.
