It seems that this term 生活美學 has become all the rage recently in writings by government agencies and promoters of art, culture and tourism.
At face value it means “life aesthetics” or “lifestyle aesthetics”, but if translated into English that way in most contexts in which I see it, people would probably think “Huh?” or gloss over it as meaningless fluff. The problem is that the term tends to be used repeatedly within articles.
I find it in sentences such as these (from different sources, with some words deliberately altered for privacy’s sake):
To me, it seems that it “quality of life” might be a more idiomatic English phrase in the first two, whereas “life-enriching” might work in the third.
It doesn’t help that there’s some entity in Dounan called 他里霧生活美學館, which seems to have no Google-able English name.
Has anyone else recently wrestled with this suddenly popular buzzword? Any insight into what it actually means? Or is it just another piece of meaningless filler?
You hit the nail on the head. It doesn’t mean anything at all by itself, so I would recommend changing things around based on context.
For number one, “quality of life.” For number two and three, maybe simply “lifestyle” (which would also be a good default translation in most cases if you can’t come up with something better).
Taipei Times seems to translate 國立台南生活美學館 as “National Tainan Living Arts Center,” but that’s honestly no better than “life aesthetics,” and maybe even more confusing to readers.
As a Taiwanese I find these are so entertaining to read… We actually never give any thought on these meaning, having an instinct to ignore these elaborated words whenever they are from government agency.
The number one can be interpreted perfectly as…
生活品質/生活水準/=lives/ standard of living/ quality of life
So you might ask where does that 美學come from? It sounds better but doesn’t make much sense.
…當台南以整個台南展開生活美學時
As a native speak I suggest you all forget this one.
I am surprised this was from 天下 magazine’s column, and I can’t understand what it is trying to say. It just shows up from nowhere in the original article. (opinion.cw.com.tw/blog/profile/46/article/576 In case someone is interested.)
…提供藝術、美食、旅遊等生活美學書籍供市民閱覽.
You might be surprised this one is good because it defines what exactly生活美學 is: “… provides books about arts, good food and traveling which lead you to a charmed life.”
In recent years the term 文創 (short for 文化創意; lit. cultural creative) has been all over the place in government material and projects (松山文創園區 for example)
It seems to have been coined by Paul Ray (http://www.elasticmind.ca/innerpreneur/index.php/cultural-creativity/) but I am wondering how much it is used abroad. Is it more of a Taiwan thing (same goes for LOHAS, a term which I really dislike) or is it used in other countries extensively as well?
Oh yeah… I encounter that one a lot. The thing is that it sounds quite elegant in Chinese (wenchuang), but it’s a mouthful in English (8 syllables). What makes it worse is that they put the term into names of places (such as “XXX Cultural and Creative Park”), giving them unnecessarily English long names, and containing a term that is sure to wear out in time, which would eventually necessitate another of those name changes the Taiwanese are so fond of.
Cultural creativity, like LOHAS, EQ and certain other terms originating in the West have oddly endured in Taiwan, whereas they quickly fell from the scene in the West. I’m constantly telling local students writing in English for an English-speaking audience not to use “EQ”, because few people will understand what they mean.
Plus the Taiwanese love to throw these trendy words around without thinking much about what they actually mean and how they’re actually used. I see “sustainable development” also being overused in this way. It’s a trendy new word, so throwing it into the text will make them sound smarter. It’s like an American junior high school student with a thesaurus, thinking big words will make him sound smart.
And then there’s 環保 (environmental protection) and 生態 (ecology), both of which should be about nature. But these days you often see terms like 心靈環保 (environmenal protection of the soul) and 立法院的生態 (ecology of the legislature). Oh wait, they did get it right. There ARE a bunch of animals in the legislature.
I can’t stand people using LOHAS. Problem is probably that LOHAS is translated as 樂活 in Chinese, which literally means “Happy Life” and not “Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability”. Therefore it is used all over the place to describe anything that is related to happy life and not necessarily to the original meaning of LOHAS. Also, somehow LOHAS makes me think of Lindsay LOHAN… :s