My VCMs – Part 81: Hongqi & Chunyan

[saskwatch]

AlbertaTime has one , martback has one , Torsten has at least one , and now I have one – a Hongqi with a peacock dial.





The listing didn’t have a crown photo, so I gambled…



…and lost. I think it’s the logo for Chunhua, a brand from Shenyang. The fact that it isn’t correct doesn’t bother me much, however.



The date code is 0377L – March 1977.

Soviet has one, but I’ve only seen the caseback. Now I have one, a Chunyan (spring swallow) from Jinan.







Unfortunately, I can’t open it for a movement photo. My 7120 wrench doesn’t fit all casebacks. I really wish it did, but it doesn’t.

This tag came with it.

[soviet]

Two more beautiful pieces of VCM for your museum. Congratulations! The crown for the Hongqi is new to me. I will check my collection for a clue.

There used to be a guy at Chengnanjiuhuo flea market who always sells VCMs in excellent to like-new conditions like yours, but for a much higher price.

[Seele]

The Chunyan tag is interesting: instead of abbreviating as "tongji" as per Chinese habit of shrinking everything into two syllables, it spells it out in full as "tongyi jixin", meaning "unified movement". If we do that in English it would be "umov" or something like that.

[soviet]

The Chunyan tag is interesting: instead of abbreviating as "tongji" as per Chinese habit of shrinking everything into two syllables, it spells it out in full as "tongyi jixin", meaning "unified movement". If we do that in English it would be "umov" or something like that.

Seele,

Do you understand what a "unified movement" is without some explanations? Was 'standardized movement' a better translation in English? Have you tried to translate some ancient Chinese poems? Like' 两岸猿声啼不住，轻舟已过万重山。'?

[soviet]

A quote from ‘McKeown's Price Guide to Antique and Classic Cameras':
TWO GOLDEN RULES that apply to Leica Collecting are:
1. That all items in excellent or like -new condition should be acquired.

2. That items of extreme rarity be acquired regardless of condition.

I think that it also applys to many other fields including VCMs. Original, clean pieces are harder to obtain now. They may not be pieces of fine art, but they are hard evidence of a piece of history.

[AlbertaTime]

Both are in excellent shape, and I love the blue Peacock!!

[Seele]

Seele,

Do you understand what a "unified movement" is without some explanations? Was 'standardized movement' a better translation in English? Have you tried to translate some ancient Chinese poems? Like' 两岸猿声啼不住，轻舟已过万重山。'?

Soviet,

Sometimes a direct translation from one language to another might be accurate in one way but missing the mark in another. While 統一機芯 can be accurately rendered in English as "unified movement", a more accurate rendition would be "standard movement" or "standardized movement".

Even something as simple as that would show the difficulty facing any translator or interpreter, as each language has lots of subtle nuances: a word-by-word "machine translation" using dictionary, Babelfish, Google Translate or such things will indeed miss the mark by a mile.

Translating poetry and such is not something I would want to tackle, as by nature these literary works push the characteristics of its language beyond the vernacular contexts: if you get the ideas across, you lose the form in that makes sense of everything. Even if you are only trying to get the idea across, Sigmund Freud is every translator's nightmare: he used all the minutae in the syntax of the German language, making translation very hard. But coming back full circle, there are some simple English phrases which are untranslatable into Chinese, try "The Silence of the Lambs".

[soviet]

Seele,

What is "The silence of the Lambs"? The most funny camera name I know is "Five Goats".

[Torsten]

Great find!

[Seele]

Seele,

What is "The silence of the Lambs"? The most funny camera name I know is "Five Goats".

That's the book and movie starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins; there is no way it can be translated into Chinese. About "Five Goats", that's the emblem of Guangzhou, but of course many Chinese names cannot be directly translated into English. Another example is a brand of pens of very good quality, but under the "White Feather" brand it bombed in every export market.