Old Third once told me about a fellow townsman of his, Fan Yun, who worked as the IT director of a company in Pusen. At the start of the new year, the company gave him a budget to upgrade its office network, hardware and software alike. After replacing the servers, he still had some money left over, so he bought the latest version of RTX for the company’s internal network.
RTX, or Real Time eXchange, was an enterprise instant-messaging platform developed by TX. The company had long used it for internal communication and file transfer. To perform a legitimate upgrade, you needed the switchboard number from the original user card; once the new license file was activated, that was that. Fan Yun logged into the official RTX website to activate it. The page loaded very slowly. More than ten seconds passed before it finally appeared, and in that instant he caught the domain in the address bar jumping from the RTX site to an unfamiliar address before snapping back again. Naturally cautious, Fan Yun immediately checked the firewall logs. Finding nothing abnormal, he let the matter go.
A few days later, while cleaning up the company’s shared directories on the LAN, he noticed that many machines in Network Neighborhood had acquired a little arrow in the lower-right corner of their icons, rather like a shortcut marker, except that it looked like a lowercase b. No one in the company except Fan Yun himself had permission to deploy software across the local network. He opened one of the arrow-marked icons. It belonged to a coworker surnamed Liu. In the shared folder there was a file he had never seen before, named boycott.ini.
Fan Yun had no memory of such a system file. Very carefully, he switched into Safe Mode and opened it with Notepad. There was no code inside, nothing like what he had expected. Only a single line:
On such-and-such a morning, in the elevator, he failed to greet me. Boycott him.
Fan Yun was baffled. Then he remembered that morning: he had been carrying breakfast and may indeed have kept his head lowered in the elevator the whole time. He opened another arrow-marked icon. In that machine’s boycott.ini, he found:
On such-and-such a day, he requested a memory upgrade and was refused. Boycott him.
He opened several more. Every file contained some minor grievance involving him, each ending with exactly the same formula: boycott him.
The word boycott is a loanword, and 杯葛 is its Chinese rendering, derived from the surname of the retired British army captain Charles Boycott. Originally it meant a coordinated refusal to buy from, sell to, or otherwise cooperate with a given individual or company. In everyday use it generally came to mean social isolation. The term remains common in Chinese communities across Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, but is much less common in mainland usage. When Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao, for instance, reported on the French president boycotting the Beijing Olympics, it used exactly this term: 杯葛.
Fan Yun copied down everything contained in those boycott.ini files, reflected on his own past conduct, and suddenly understood why certain coworkers had recently grown cold toward him. In all kinds of indirect, tactful ways, he expressed his apologies. A few days later, the little arrows quietly disappeared one by one from the icons on the local network.
He later told the whole story to Old Third. But when Old Third upgraded RTX at his own company, nothing of the sort happened. Nor was Fan Yun ever able to find another boycott.ini file.
Old Third said that Fan Yun must have had some other strange encounter before acquiring that uncanny “boycott” software, or else had invented the tale in the guise of a friend’s experience in order to offer him a sideways lesson in workplace conduct.
As for me, what I want to say is this: more than a century ago, translators in China could produce renderings like 杯葛, 商博良, and 华盛顿, names that balanced sound, sense, and cultural fit. Today, translators can do little more than shout out half-digested foreign names like Solskjaer and C. Ronaldo. It is hard not to see that as a loss.