There are certain words in Chinese that are not easily translated into English, and which often require re-casting or paraphrasing to express. Off the top of my head, here are a few:
第幾 (di4ji3) “what-th”, “how-many-th”. In English you can say “I came in third place in the race.” But there’s no interrogative form for this in English: “You came in what-th place in the race?”
學長 (xue2zhang3), 學姊 (xue2jie3), 學弟 (xue2di4), 學妹 (xue2mei4): 學長 means a male student who is a year ahead of you in school: if you’re in 10th grade, an 11th grade male student is your 學長 even if he is younger than you. The terms are integral to school culture in Taiwan: 學長 and 學姊 are to be respected and learned from; 學弟 and 學妹 are to be helped and guided. We simply don’t have an equivalent concept in the West, as far as I’m aware.
Then there are words like 芬多精 (fen1duo1jing1). This actually has an English term–“phytoncide”–a class of volatile aromatic compounds produced by pine trees, which are supposed to be good to breathe in. the problem, regarding translation, is in the relative frequencies of use in the respective languages. Ask your average Taiwanese on the street if they’ve heard of 芬多精, and they’ll likely say “yes”, and may even be able to explain what it is. As such, this word is common in local tourist literature. But you could go into a city full of English speakers and spend all day asking passersby if they’ve heard of “phytoncide”, and it’s unlikely that any will reply in the affirmative. Thus, it would be unwise to translate 芬多精 as “phytoncide” in travel literature, and instead just use “fresh forest air” or something that we would say.
Can anyone else think of other hard-to-translate words?
學長/學姊 The closest equivalent I’ve thought of would be something like upper classman, or some similarly anachronistic terms from boarding schools. But, you’re right, the concept largely doesn’t exist in the West.
Not just a year ahead. A xuezhang can be any number of years ahead of you. So Lee Teng-hui is technically Ma Ying-jeou’s xuezhang from National Taiwan University, but I doubt Ma would ever address him as one.
導師 can be hard to translate. The closest we have to a 導師 in the US is a homeroom teacher. But we didn’t have homeroom teachers after 8th grade. Here they have them in college! Sometimes it’s translated as “mentor”, but that’s more of an honorary title unofficially given to a teacher by a “mentee”. I usually use “academic advisor” for the simple reason than we actually have those in American universities.
There are some words of courtesy that can be hard to translate. When you leave someone’s house after you visit, the host might say 慢慢走 (Lit. “Leave slowly” or, perhaps more appropriately, “No hurry”). And the person leaving might say 我捨不得 (something like “I can’t bear parting from you”). But these are things we don’t tend to say in the west. Also, the first person who leaves from a group will tend to say “我先走” (“I’ll be the first to leave”) But in the West, we don’t emphasize the “first” part, instead saying perhaps “Well, I’m off” or “I gotta get going”.
人文 is often (mis?)used to mean “culture”. As far as I can tell, this usage is a trend that’s popped up over the last several years. It’s in a class of words I call (completely unscientifically, mind you!) “neo-Taiwanisms”, others of which include 在地 and 亂象.
Talking of culture, another “untranslatable” word is 內涵 as in 文化內涵. It means “content” or “substance”, but in most cases I find it extraneous. People seem to add it unnecessarily because it sounds sophisticated.
The classic - ‘Ni chi bao le ma?’ greeting, Have you eaten yet? You are not supposed to go into your dietary habits for that day, but simply nod or say yes and move on in the conversation.
‘Qing duo zhi jiao’ - When meeting a person more senior than you or somebody important for the first time, you might ask this, meaning ‘I want you to advise me’, many Asian countries use this but there is nothing exactly similar in English.
‘Ren Qi’, a celebrity’s current level of hotness in the media.
‘Ni de bi zi hao ting’- Your nose bridge is very high, yes a definite compliment in Taiwan and one you will very unlikely have encountered before. Took me a long time to figure out what a former date was talking about my nose for.
‘Shuang Yan Pi’- double eyelid, again not something most Westerners would notice but Taiwanese/Chinese tend to like as they are mostly single eyelidded (yeah whatever…)
'Zheng Wu Guan '- a face that has the 5 parts well proportioned, anyway means a fairly attractive face, your nose is not bent to the side or anything, it’s actually requested in descriptions of jobs here
‘Guan Xi’ - although could be described as I scratch your back you scratch mine it goes a bit deeper than any English description I can think of, hence why most foreigners just use the word guanxi without translating.
‘QQ’- it can be translated as chewiness/al dente but as a concept it is not something Westerners could really understand unless they lived here for a while
well, the relationship words are more obvious since there’s no analogs in many western countries. The way Chinese clans go into such detail demarcating names (relations) for practically each relative you can think of (whose name you can instantly tell whether you are in a senior paternal or junior maternal line eg.) simply is not important to American nuclear families for e.g.
a little OT, but for kicks:
There’s actually a very interesting anthro theory about family-relative naming I read somewhere that explains the reasons behind more or less detail in a given society in naming relations correlates to the amount of inter-family-clan dependence for survival, development ie level of cooperation. Supposedly, the entire world’s cultures fit into 4 or 5 models (with minor variations) - they are arbitrarily called Hawaiian, [some African tribe], Omaha, Crow, Iroquois, etc.
haha Chris, there’s a lot of extraneous words which I detest used by Chinese to sound erudite. Lot of it leftovers from Classical Chinese like yu 于, etc. just a extra pain in the butt.
欠揍 qian4zou4 often has to be recast; 你很欠揍 is not usually meant literally (‘you are owed a beating’), and could be a groan, ‘Doh!’ or “Oh, you!”, ‘you’re a pain’, ‘don’t be an arse’, and so on.
Similarly, 討厭! isn’t all that directly translatable in most cases, and a wide variety of substitutes may be called for (e.g., Drat!)
班 (“class”) can be hard to translate accurately in a university context. It’s usually translated as “class”, but there are important distinctions.
In the US, the word “class” (as in a group of students) has two common meanings: one is a group of students taking the same course at the same time in the same classroom; the other is the entire cohort of students who are scheduled to graduate in a specific year (e.g. the class of 2011, the junior class president). So “I got the highest score in my class on the midterm” refers to the first, whereas “She graduated at the top of her class” refers to the second.
In Taiwan’s universities, however, students within a department are grouped into three or four divisions called 班, usually translated as “class”. They might be called Class A, B, and C. So if you claim you graduated at the top of your class, it doesn’t mean you earned the highest GPA of all graduating students; it means you got the highest GPA in your particular division within your particular department. Thus, you could easily have dozens or even hundreds of students in any given year who “graduated at the top of the class”.
What about the “NI ZAI NALI!?” that everybody asks as soon as you pick up the phone?
It took me forever to realise that that actually just meant ‘Hello’. I actually used to tell people where I was; now I know the only acceptable answers are: “Out” or “At home”.
[quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”]What about the “NI ZAI NALI!?” that everybody asks as soon as you pick up the phone?
It took me forever to realise that that actually just meant ‘Hello’. I actually used to tell people where I was; now I know the only acceptable answers are: “Out” or “At home”.[/quote]
Actually, they don’t add “zai” at all. What they’re saying is “Ni nali zhao?” which is a polite way of saying “Who is calling?”
This is certainly not untranslatable: depending on level of formality, you can translate it as “Who is this?”, “May I have your name?” or something similar.
Yeah, “box lunch” and “bento box” are close but no cigar.
“lunch box” is even worse.
熱鬧 (re4nao4) is notoriously difficult to translate. It means crowded and noisy with lots of activity going on, like at a carnival or a night market. Sometimes translated as “bustling”, “teeming”, “vibrant”, “exciting”.
