Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm shows how a revolution could lead to the rise of opportunists, power struggles, infighting, fake news, and ultimately a new breed of authoritarians. Even though Orwell was looking at the rise of Joseph Stalin in post-revolution Russia as the model for his animal farm, we would later see the same sequence of events in Communist Cuba, Chairman Mao’s China, and other places. In this episode, my cohost Su and I discuss Thakin Ba Thaung’s translation of Animal Farm, titled ခြေလေးချောင်းတော်လှန်ရေး (The Four-Legged Revolution), and how some of the chapters are chillingly similar to what has happened, and is still happening in present day Burma, our homeland. Along the way, we give you the Burmese words and phrases you can use to talk about dictator pigs and dogs in the book, and in the world we live in. (Music courtesy of Pixabay)Vocabularyဂန္ထဝင် classicသခင်ဘသောင်း Thakhin Ba Thaung, a Burmese translator of Animal Farmခြေလေးချောင်းတော်လှန်ရေး The Four-Legged Revolution, name of a Burmese translation of Animal Farmလေရူးသုန်သုန် Wild Gust Blowing, Burmese name for a translation of Gone with the Windဘာသာပြန်တယ် to translateလက်ထောက်ပုလိပ်အုပ် assistant superintendent of policeမူရင်း originalအနှစ်သာရ essenceအဓိကဖြစ်ရပ် main eventsအာဏာရှင်စနစ် authoritarianism ဖိနှိပ်တယ် to oppressအာဏာယစ်မူးတယ် to be drunk with powerအာခံတယ် to defyသုတ်သင်တယ် to execute, to eliminate လူတန်းစားခွဲခြားတယ် to discriminate by classစည်းရုံးတယ် to persuade others to joinပင်မဇာတ်ကောင် main charactersမျက်မှောက်ကာလ current ageခေတ်ပြိုင်ကာလ contemporary eraစင်ပြိုင်ပါတီ rival partyဗန္ဓုလ Bandoola, name of a historical general, also the Burmese name for Napoleon in the Burmese version of Animal Farm သံကြောင် squeaky voice, name of the character Squealer in a Burmese translation of Animal Farmအသံပြာပြာနဲ့ with scratchy, raspy voiceဝါဒဖြန့်တယ် to spread propaganda ကိုယ်စားပြုတယ် to embodyလူမှုကွန်ရက် social media ဝါဒမှိုင်းမိတယ် to be swept up in propaganda ခို pigeonသာတူညီမျှ to be equalဘုရားမြှောက်တယ် to turn someone into a Godပဋိညာဉ် pledge, oath, agreementသားရေကွင်းဥပဒေ rubber band regulation, meaning it bends to serve a groupကျုံ့တယ် to shrinkဆန့်တယ် to expand အခွင့်ထူးခံလူတန်းစား the privileged classဇာတ်ကွက် dramatic sceneသစ္စာဖေါက် traitor သွေးညှီနံ့ the stench of bloodလက်နက်ကိုင် armed, weapon carryingHave a question about a Burmese word or phrase you heard here? Send us a message.

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