OK, I’m doing a short translation project. In Chinese-to-English translation I’m used to seeing illogical sentences - logical flow is often low on the priorities of many writers here. But this is a doozy:
Flowers are the theme of this year’s Art Festival, entitled Alice in the Glass Flower City, because flower imagery represents the bliss of paradise in the Islamic regions of India.
Nowhere in the article is there any other mention of India or Islam or paradise. And neither is Alice (possibly the character from Alice in Wonderland) mentioned elsewhere, though the “garden city” created for the Art Festival is supposed to be like a fantasyland.
As far as I can tell, you didn’t miss anything; it’s just unclear writing.
I’m used to seeing stuff like this. The average person in any country doesn’t write particularly well and doesn’t have strong logic skills either. It is what it is – poor thinking and bad writing. You have to translate it as is, and shrug it off. Don’t let it bother you.
Generally in a situation like this I’ll try to do minor repairs on the sentence, salvaging it so it at least sounds acceptable in English, while at the same time striving for faith to the intended meaning. I do this so as not to make the original writer (or me as the translator) look like a complete idiot.
When there’s a sentence with “yinwei…suoyi”, you feel free to leave out either the “because” or the “therefore”, don’t you? Leaving out the “because” in this case is okay in my view. It’s what you might call a “weak causal relationship” (weak to the point of almost nonexistence – probably just dropped in there because it was the first connective phrase the writer came up with) so I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s about the meaning, not the words.
That is so true, but unfortunately it would appear alright to shrug it off in Chinese by adding more flowery phrases and endless adjectives, perhaps an obscure chengyu if you can muster it. All of which is extremely agonising for the translator.
To be fair, the system does produce brilliant calculators and currency converters.
That is so true, but unfortunately it would appear alright to shrug it off in Chinese by adding more flowery phrases and endless adjectives, perhaps an obscure chengyu if you can muster it. [/quote]
Why bother with an obscure one?
I think these cliche dictionaries are fab. What are they called? “Chengyu Cidian”? You can bang together several thousand words of someone else’s writing and make it look like you wrote it by swapping the four-character cliches around. Beats thinking.
And remember to start every sentence with one of the following:
Also
Besides
Moreover
However
As to …
With regard to …
With [subordinate clause]… [predicate - if any - hidden at very end after long string of dependent clauses]
Given [subordinate clause]… [predicate - if any - hidden at very end after long string of dependent clauses]
While… [ditto]
I like your “yinwei” up there. Sometimes you just have to guess at what the relationships between the clauses are. This is because the nuances of Chinese are too subtle for foreigners to understand, rather than due to the author’s not knowing himself what the hell he’s talking about. Hell, I read stuff every day written by the Western-educated kids of Taiwan’s plutocracy and there’s not a causal relationship in sight, just clauses linked by conjunctions selected using the “Insert Random Conjunction” button in Chinese Word. You’ve seen that, right? If you’ve got Doctor Eye, it’s just right of the “Insert Long Impressive-Sounding Word Where Short Direct One Would Have Been More Appropriate” button.
How about the ever-popular (and never correctly deployed):
The (comparative) the (subject), the (comparative 2) the (subject 2) (auxiliary).
ETA: My colleague (a real one, as opposed to the hordes of sub-evolutional simians with whom I share office space) points out the thus-far absence of the all-time favourite:
“On the other hand…” when what follows is anything but…
I agree with IL that ‘yinwei’ can express much weaker causality than ‘because’ in English. Sometimes (as in this case) the writer is just trying to show there is some kind of connection between the clauses. ‘As’ sometimes works better. Or you can drop it like IL suggested.
And don’t let me start ranting about ‘art’ translations.
[quote=“Jive Turkey”]Nowadays, uppity foreigners just think they know everything about Chinese and translation.
Sorry, I just had the overwhelming urge to use the mainlanders’ much loved “nowadays” in a sentence. Carry on.[/quote]
Good God, I wish this were confined to the mainland…I was considering, a while ago, renegotiating my contract such that I no longer received a salary, but got NT10 for each “besides” and “nowadays” I deleted…early retirement…
Well, when I went to school in Taiwan (imagine that!) there was a class called 新聞編譯. The whole idea was that you took an English news article and did not simply translate it, but adapted it to be suitable for a Chinese-speaking audience. (I managed not to take this class as there was little point for me to further polish my already stellar writing skills in Chinese :roflmao:
ok, ok, my Chinese writing sucks.
). I don’t believe that the Chinese would agree, however, that there is a need for this kind of thing going in the OTHER direction – i.e., making Chinese texts into acceptable and plausible English ones requires anything more than knowing a whole lot of individual words (since, after all, the Chinese have a far superior grasp of English grammar than any mere native speaker!)
I’m actually doing the whole bian-yi thing on a regular basis with the GIO. Sometimes I really wonder how they pick their articles. The audience is supposed to be international, and I realize it’s nice to showcase local culture, but some of the details included in these articles would just put an English-speaking audience to sleep – not to mention the repetitions. I approach that particular client with a rather large knife and broad axe of bian-yi, but so far they haven’t had any complaints, evidently.
