2010-11-01

Mao Zedong in Kazakh

In a recent conversation, a question came up: "Was Mao Zedong's Little Red Book ever published in Kazakh?" I am pretty sure it was, although I have not actually seen it. In fact, quite a few works of Mao, Lenin and Stalin, appeared in Kazakh translation in the 1970s. The script in use was quite interesting: it was "Kazakh Pinyin": a Latin-based script that was used in PRC for a couple decades (apparently introduced in since 1964, and "enforced" in 1976), until it was abolished in favor of the more traditional Perso-Arabic script ca. 1983.

Below are a couple pages from Mao Zedong's Selected Works, Volume 1, in Kazakh. (You can click through any picture for an enlarged view).

Note the rather unusual letter Ƣ (which corresponds to the Turkish Ğ and the Cyrillic Kazakh Ғ). I am not aware of any "official" alphabet that uses it now, but I think it was in a few Latin-based alphabets of Soviet Central Asia in the 1930s (mostly Turkic languages, but also Dungan).

Some fiction, such as Lu Xun's The True story of Ah Q was published in that alphabet as well.

P.S. Here's more on the statistics of this translation industry.

No comments:

Post a Comment