This course offers you basic but valuable techniques used by a good translator in the translation between English and Chinese. We’ll discuss what is translation, what is good translation, and learn about how to produce good translations. All the examples used in this course are taken from the course instructor's own translations of various genres and topics of writing. These examples are elaborated on to show you how to understand the idea, style and tone of the writer, the historical and cultural context of the writing, as well as the explicit and implied meanings of words, the grammatical structures of sentences, and the logic of sentences and paragraphs in order to achieve faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance in the translation. After completing this course, you will know what makes a qualified professional translator and acquire the abilities and skills that such a translator needs
Analyzing Grammar and Logic
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来自 Nanjing University 的课程
Translation in Practice
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从本节课中
Understanding and Expressing Word Meaning
This module discusses how to understand word meaning in the source language and how to express word meaning in the target language.
与讲师见面
Yuan YaoAssociate Professor
When we talked about the process of translation,
we mentioned that analysis of grammatical structure of a sentence and
logical relationships between sentences can help us understand word meanings.
In this lesson, we're going to use more examples to illustrate this point.
Using context clues to guess word meaning is
a skill that we often use in reading comprehension.
With context clues, including the grammatical relationships and logical relationships,
we can guess the meanings of words while
reading instead of looking up the dictionary all that time.
In translation, these clues can help us in two ways.
One, help us quickly select a meaning from a long list of meanings in a dictionary.
And two, help us detect the mistakes we may have
made in understanding the meaning of words.
It's time again for examples.
The first example. You can grab a coffee in
tony West or North Vancouver and in less than 20 minutes,
drive switchback roads to rugged mountain country,
complete with old-growth forest,
alpine lakes and meadows,
and in some spots, breathtaking views of the cityscape below.
The original translation of the first part of this sentence is, [FOREIGN].
Tony seems to be a name we're familiar with.
Tony West seems to be the name of a cafe,
hence the Chinese translation, [FOREIGN].
However, if we read carefully,
we notice that in this sentence,
the first letter of tony is not capitalized,
which means it is not a person's name.
Besides, isn't it odd to put North Vancouver,
a city in the greater Vancouver area,
side by side with a cafe?
We need to look up the word tony with small letter T. This would actually means,
"marked by a high-toned manner or style".
Now it make sense.
What I mention together are West Vancouver and North Vancouver,
two cities marked by a high-toned style.
We cannot translate tony into a Tony just because it looks like the name Tony.
The Chinese translation of this sentence is,
[FOREIGN].
The second example.
"No reference to Edmund Blunden is complete without reference to poetry,
for first and foremost he's a poet.
'He thought in numbers and numbers came.'
He wrote poetry much as we would write emails today".
In this example, it is very clear that this Edmund Blunden is a poet.
Is he a mathematician, too?
We know numbers means, [FOREIGN],
so he thought in numbers means, [FOREIGN].
How weird it is for the writer to say that he's a poet in the first sentence,
to mention his mathematical talents in the second sentence,
and then again talk about this poetry writing in the third sentence?
If the first sentence says,
Blunden is a poet,
and the third sentence describes how he writes as a poet,
isn't logical for the second sentence to describe how he thinks as a poet.
We must look up the word, number.
To our surprise, number can mean "metrical lines".
Well, if it means metrical lines,
the three sentences are logically
connected to each other.
[FOREIGN].
The third example.
"On a personal level,
the beginning of the seventies saw many of us leave university,
start working our the first jobs, and get married.
The end of the decade saw many of us with children or divorced or living in sin.
In this example, we may not know the phrase,
living in sin, but we know sin means [FOREIGN].
Does living in sin mean [FOREIGN]?
The two sentences talk about university graduates who find a job,
get married, have children, and get divorced.
But then suddenly, they jumped to living a simple life.
What's the relationship between this last part of
the sentence and those that come before it?
That's when we look up the phrase,
and find that it means,
"live together without getting married".
[FOREIGN].
Now, the translation flows.
The fourth example.
Who would object to more people receiving higher education?
Or more lads from poor families getting the break?".
The word, break, as we know it, means [FOREIGN].
The question is, how does objecting to people receiving
higher education relates to objecting people getting a rest?
We have no doubt at all about the meaning of higher education.
So we should look up the word, break.
This word can mean "opportunity".
In this context, it means the opportunity
to receive higher education.
[FOREIGN].
The fifth example.
"Be the flip, look at the mini!"
"Be sure the minis are all in again,
don't you know?" "She has the legs."
Two women in this dialogue discuss miniskirts,
and then one says that, she has legs.
Of course, one cannot wear miniskirts without legs.
But is it really necessary to point out that she has legs?
But wait, let's read the last sentence again.
It is, she has the legs,
not, she has legs.
What legs does she have?
Legs that are perfect for wearing miniskirts. This is the discussion.
[FOREIGN].
The sixth example.
[FOREIGN].
We know this would [FOREIGN] in this example.
[FOREIGN] refers to free public or private school
where children from poor families could go,
or a charity school.
However, what is the relationship between such a school and Buddhism?
Why are the center for
the translation Buddhist sutras and the center for charity school juxtaposed?
And it is odd to say that a city is a center for charity schools.
Were there a lot of such schools in that city?
Since the topic of these two sentences is Buddhism,
let's look at a Buddhism dictionary and see if we can find anything.
We find in a dictionary that [FOREIGN] means [FOREIGN].
So, [FOREIGN] is not a school but a field of study.
The study of prajna.
In Jiagnang, the region south of the Yangtze River,
Nanjing was the first city that dissimulated Buddhist teachings.
Eminent Buddhist monks from
different dynasties translated thousands of Buddhist sutras in Nanjing,
making the city an important center in China for the translation
of Buddhist sutras and the study of prajna.
The seventh example.
[FOREIGN] This is a sentence from the introduction of Grant Bhawan temple in Nanjing.
It is said that Xuanzang,
a well known Buddhist monk in the Tang dynasty,
sighed when he saw the neglected Buddha statues in India on
his pilgrimage to the west.
[FOREIGN].
There was a millennium between the time Xuangzang and the time of Buddha.
There has been a millennium since sariras of the parietal bone of Xuangzang
and a sarira of the parietal bone of Buddha were enshrined in the Grand Baoen Temple.
While Xuangzang sighed that he could not see Buddha itself,
his dream comes true in this exhibition area named,
Gaze across a Millennium,
in the sacred land of great gratitude.
It captures the wonderful moment of
master Xuangzang's encounter with Buddha across time and space,
and presents the extraordinary connection between Xuangzang and Buddha.
The Chinese sentence, [FOREIGN],
means that Xuangzang was right,
that he cannot see Buddha after all.
But this is not the message.
This exhibition airway's sense to the visitors.
To enshrine the sariras together is one way
of making his dream of meeting Buddha himself come true.
Instead of translating the word [FOREIGN] into a sigh or lament,
we should translate it into dream.
While Xuangzang sighed that he could not see Buddha himself,
his dream comes true in this exhibition area.
In doing translation, we find ourselves
analyzing the grammar and the logic of the source language very often.
This analysis helps a lot in our understanding of the word meanings.
