Changkhui Thai podcast

Every once in a while someone will ask me, or one of the webboards I frequent, for recommendations for books, movies, or podcasts to help practice their Thai. And so I've been known to recommend ช่างคุย (changkhui.com), the only true podcast I know of in the Thai language. (Hopefully that will change.)

A few months ago, after making just such a recommendation on the ThaiVisa forum, Changkhui webmaster and podcaster-in-chief Passakorn Hongsyok noticed all the referrals coming from the ThaiVisa, and followed the links back to my posting. From there he invited me to be a guest on his show. It took a few months to find a free evening, but last Sunday I finally went to his condo and recorded an episode. It went online today as ช่างคุย #153 (or try the direct mp3 link, 30MB). I was still getting over a cold, and drank ridiculous amounts of water throughout the episode to try to soothe my throat, so please think charitable thoughts when you listen. :)

I really enjoyed talking with Passakorn, and I really enjoy Changkhui in general. Actually, it's a "podcast station" with at least a dozen different podcasts on many topics. See for yourself. Passakorn even does an English language podcast, though he has trouble finding guests. After we recorded a Thai language episode he and I started an English one, but my voice couldn't take anymore and we had to stop. We'll try again soon.

Podcasting is a hobby for Passakorn, and an expensive one no doubt given all the bandwidth he must use. Please consider making a PayPal donation to Changkhui or buying one of the nice polo shirts on offer to offset the site's expenses (links are on the webpage).

There are sundry ways to consume Changkhui:

iTunes - RSS - FeedBurner

Logos from Google Thailand

Google is known for the custom logos it places on its homepage on holidays and other occasions. And with the worldwide spread of Google, their many country sites display logos specific to the local culture.

Google Thailand (google.co.th) is currently showing a logo celebrating Loy Krathong (ลอยกระทง):

Some earlier Google Thailand logos:

Songkran 2008

Songkran 2009

National Artist Day 2009

Old Thai Movie DVD Roundup, Part 3: The Legend Collection from Five Star Productions

More than a year after I first read about it on Wise Kwai's blog, Five Star Productions has finally begun releasing the promised films from its vault. At the end of August it was announced that Five Star had signed a deal with media distribution company BKP to release more than 100 titles from its film vault on DVD.

The set has been dubbed The Legend Collection, or in Thai ตำนานหนังกลางใจ. This will be a re-release on DVD for some titles, but it will be the first DVD treatment for the vast majority of these films. Some 70 specific titles have been announced, and will be released in "volumes" of seven titles each. Fourteen titles, comprising the first two volumes of The Legend Collection, were released in September. The retail price is set at 199, but they are easily found for 139 baht. Unfortunately, none will have English subtitles.

This weekend I bought Vol. 1 No. 1, อนึ่งคิดถึงพอสังเขป, directed by Bhandit Rittakol. The quality of the transfer appears very good, as far as these things go. I'll write more about that soon.

For now, some more highlights from this impressive collection:

* 12 films by director Piak Poster -- almost every film he made between 1978 and 1996. (Two of his first films, โทน / Tone (1970) and ชู้ / Adulterer (1972) were released on DVD in 2007 by Triple X films.)

* 8 films from the Charuchinda entertainment dynasty -- 4 directed by Sakka Charuchinda (สักกะ จารุจินดา), and 4 directed by his son, Narong Charuchinda (ณรงค์ จารุจินดา).

* 7 films by director Euthana Mukdasanit, more than half of his directorial efforts. (His 1997 film จักรยานสีแดง / Red Bike Story was released by GMM this year as part of its Memory Collection.

* 6 films by Bhandit Rittakol. (A limited edition box set of all 6 films in Bhandit's original Boonchu series was also released last year.)

* 3 of the most well-known films of National Artist Vichit Kounavudhi: Mountain People, Son of the Northeast, and Her Name is Boonrawd.

Many of the films are adapted from well-known Thai books:

* นำพุ้ / The Story of Nam Phu (1984) and เขาชื่อกานต์ His Name is Kan (1988) are both based on books by Suwanni Sukhontha (สุวรรณี สุคนธา).

* คนทรงเจ้า / The Medium (1989) is based on the 1988 book of the same name by S.E.A. Write Award-winning author Wimon Sainimnuam (วิมล ไทรนิ่มนวล)

* ผีเสื้อและดอกไม้ / Butterfly and Flowers (1985), based on the 1978 book of the same name by Makut Oraruedi (under the pen name นิพพานฯ).

* ครูไหวใจร้าย / Mean Ms. Wai (1989), from the 1966 book by Phakawadi Uttamot (ผกาวดี อุตตโมทย์).

* ปริศนา / Enigma (1982), from the novel by HRH Princess Vibhavadi Rangsit (under her pen name ว.ณ ประมวลมารค).

* ข้างหลังภาพ / Behind the Painting (1985), from the 1936 novel by Siburapha (ศรีบูรพา).

* ไผ่แดง / Red Bamboo (1979), from the book by Kukrit Pramoj (คึกฤทธิ์ ปราโมช), a former Prime Minister and founder of Siam Rath newspaper.

* ลูกอีสาน / Son of the Northeast (1982), from the S.E.A. Write Award-winning novel by Kampoon Boonthavee (คำพูน บุญทวี).

* ผู้หญิงคนนั้นชื่อบุญรอด / Her Name is Boorawd (1985), from the pen of the prolific Botan (โบตั๋น).

[Update: Here is the spreadsheet I made of the 70 titles announced so far. Each DVD includes a booklet listing the titles from the first 10 volumes. Since the Thai film industry does so many remakes, sometimes it's ambiguous exactly which version of the film they will be releasing.]

One week until Book Expo Thailand 2009

Where has the time gone? Thailand's semiannual book fair is upon us again. As regular readers will recall, the October incarnation is known as Book Expo Thailand (งานมหกรรมหนังสือ).

Book Expo Thailand 2009 will run from Thursday, October 15 through Sunday, October 25, 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. As usual, this massive book fair will be held at Queen Sirikit Convention Centre. I recommend traveling by subway -- the Convention Centre has its own stop. The book fair is always packed every single day, so parking is a nightmare.

If you've never been, I absolutely recommend it. There's really something for everyone. In a past year at the book fair I met Win Lyovarin, a Thai author I enjoy, and last time I even ran into the enviably prolific and all-around smart Sarinee Achavanuntakul of Fringer.org.

Further details on Book Expo Thailand here (in Thai).

The dates for the 38th National Book Fair have also been announced as March 26 - April 6, 2010.

[See also: The state of the Thai publishing industry.]

Nigerian scam in Thailand

Advance-fee fraud is also commonly called a "Nigerian scam", because the African country is home to large numbers of people employing this scam technique.

People get hooked by their own greed, when some kind stranger emails them out of the blue to ask them to serve as the next of kin for some heirless millionaire, or lets them know they've won some valuable prize. Most of these never make it to my inbox, thanks to email spam filters.

This one didn't make it to my inbox either, but I spotted it in my spam directory while looking for spam false positives. It's absolutely 100% classic Nigerian scam, but the story is based on Thai soil this time:

From The Desk Of Barrister Kane Chan,
Kane Chan & Associate Chambers
37 Sathorn Tai Road, Bangkok Thailand.
Tel: [redacted]
Email: [redacted]

PRIVATE AND HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL.

Dear Friend,

Please kindly accept my apology for sending unsolicited mail to you I believe you are a highly respected personality considering the fact that I sourced your profile from a human resource profile database on your country. Though, I do not know to what extent you are familiar with events.

Well, I am Barrister Kane Chan, a Solicitor. I am the Personal Attorney to Mr.Steve Anderson, who used to work with SIAMRAK Company Limited in Bangkok Thailand. On the 21st of April 2004, My late client and his wife with their three children were involved in a car accident along Sukhumvit Express Road. Unfortunately, they all lost their lives in the event of the accident. Since then I have made several inquiries to your Embassy to locate any of my client's relatives, this has also proved unsuccessful.

After these several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to trace his relatives over the Internet to locate any member of his family but to no avail, hence, I contacted you to assist in repatriating the money left behind by my client in a Finance Company.Particularly, the Finance House where the deceased deposited the US$35 Million (Thirty Five Million United States Dollars only).

Consequently, this Finance House issued me a notice to provide the Next of Kin to claim the US$35 Million (Thirty Five Million United States Dollars only) in their custody within the next ten official working days. Since I have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for over 5 years now, I seek your consent to present you as the next of kin of the deceased to claim the fund as the Next of Kin to him so that the fund will be transferred to your account by the Finance House.

Upon receipt of the fund, I will come over to your country to meet with you for the disbursement of the fund and then you and I will share the money in this order: 55% will be for me, 45% will be for you. I have all the necessary legal documents that can back our claim we will make with the Finance House.

All I require is your honest co-operation to enable us seeing this deal through. I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law. Once you are interested to work with me,your urgent response is needed please kindly get back to me as soon possible for more info as we cannot afford delays and also send me your full name and your direct telephone number for easy communication.

You are needed as a next of kin to inherit your brother left fund.

Best regards .

Barrister Kane Chan (Esq).
BARRISTER AT LAW (ESQ)

The email address was from a Hong Kong Yahoo account (ending in @yahoo.com.hk), but the phone number provided had a Thai country code, and the right number of digits to be a real cell phone number. I've removed the number because (a) if it's a real scammer's number, I don't want somebody to come along and read this and end up getting scammed because they're gullible, and (b) if it's just a randomly chosen number, I don't want poor Joe to get gullible morons pestering him either.

Anyway, this is the first time I've seen Thailand used a the purported source of funds in a Nigerian scam. There's no reason to assume the scammers are actually Thai, but you never know. One of the variations of the Nigerian scam is to lure the mark to one's own country, at which point the scammer holds his mark for ransom.

I Googled around and found variations on this email reported on scam watchdog sites, using at least four different barrister names and email addresses. Sadly, these scams will continue to work so long as there are still people who live at intersection of greedy and gullible in the Venn diagram of humanity.

Marcel Barang: new blog, new translations

If you are interested in Thai literature, especially translations of it, then it's a necessity to know the name of Marcel Barang. He is the world's foremost translator of Thai fiction into English and French. Not only is he prolific, but so few do what he does, making his work all the more valuable.

Today I was delighted to learn that he now keeps a blog, alternately writing in French and English, called the written wor(l)d en deux langues. It's managed to escape my attention since he began it in July, but I'm glad it didn't take me until next year to find it.

What is Marcel blogging about?

Most notably, he's completed working on a new English translation of สี่แผ่นดิน (See Phaendin) by คึกฤทธิ์ ปราโมช (Kukrit Pramoj), a former Prime Minister of Thailand. It was translated previously in 1981 under the title Four Reigns by "Tulachandra", the pen name of จันทร์แจ่ม บุนนาค (Janjaem Bunnag), who passed away in 2007, better known for her translations of Western literature into Thai.

In his must-read anthology "The Twenty Best Novels of Thailand" (1994), Marcel wrote somewhat critically of that translation:

[Tulachandra] did a creditable job of condensing the masterpiece, but spoiled it by taking upon herself the role of cultural tour guide, pepper­ing her text with mentions such as “At that time, we Thais thought that...” that are not in the original and leaving behind more than one hundred Thai words and phrases for foreign readers to memorize, I presume – from countless repetitions of the basic mai pen rai (‘never mind’) and sanuk (‘funny’) to convoluted formulas in court language.

At Marcel's primary website, thaifiction.com, you can read a lengthy excerpt from See Phaendin that he did for the same anthology, as well as many other of his translated books and stories in their entirety.

Marcel also notes in the anthology that he submitted this excerpt to Kukrit Pramoj (who passed away in 1995), but received the following reply from Kukrit's personal secretary [English translation by Marcel]:

"Judging from the sample you sent us, we think your translation is much inferior to the standard of the novel, which will destroy the quality of language and depth of Thai culture of a time when the diversity of Western cultures was not as numerous as it is today. Therefore, MR Kukrit Pramoj, the author, does not allow you to translate and publish See Phaendin."

This time around, let's hope he has the family on his side.

There are many other posts not to be missed on Marcel's blog:

"Lost in translation" -- in which Marcel reveals that his translation of Chart Korbjitti's หมาเน่าลอยน้ำ will soon be published, and that he has also translated a compilation of Chart's best short stories.

Or "The novel that doesn't exist", recounting the accidental rediscovery of a novel that neither Google nor the National Library could find.

A four part series "On literary translation from the Thai" (one, two, three, four).

And last but not least, we can expect a new-and-improved version of thaifiction.com within the month.

A new life for the FSI Thai language course

Catherine over at Women Learning Thai has written a post about the FSI Thai Wiki Project, a collaborative project that we helped start, with the goal of digitizing the entire U.S. Foreign Service Institute's Thai language course, and adding Thai script in the process. The original course uses only romanized Thai, something we think needs fixing.

We're working on this via wiki, which means that we want and need your help. If you'd like to help type out some of the Thai, proofread some of the English, or format some wiki pages, then please send me an email at rdockum [at] gmail [dot] com.

The two-volume FSI course has a lot of excellent material. Drawing heavily from Richard B. Noss' (also excellent) 1964 Thai Reference Grammar, it remains very useful nearly half a century later. Sure, parts of the FSI course are outdated, but as I've written before, you can't beat the price. Courtesy of the American taxpayer, you get a 40-lesson course complete with accompanying audio for each lesson, and an audio introduction to Thai phonology. (Get them in PDF and MP3 format here.)

Please see Catherine's post for more information, or the Google Group that I started for this (and future) collaborative Thai language projects.

Rock the vote

The website Lexiophiles is sponsoring a vote for the top language blogs. I've been nominated (along with 99 others.. w00t) in the "language learning" category. The power is now in your hands to determine the order of the top 100.

My goal is to crack the top 90. Won't you please help?

[Edit: Catherine at WLT is a better person than me: she listed the other Thai bloggers also nominated. Congrats all around. :)]