translation of 美喻

[Paolo]

Can anyone help me with the English translation of 美喻 as a verb/noun? Below is the text in which it appears:

清代时，白云山距市区有15里之远，而如今，随着城市建设与发展，白云山融入到城市中，在中国或者世界的诸多大城市中，能像广州这样在繁华闹市中拥有一座充满自然生机又与人如此亲近的山峦，可不多见。白云山成为调节城市生态环境的“天然大氧吧”，被

美喻

为广州“市肺”。 它的“山幽、林绿、气清、景美”让人非常向往。

I can imagine it may be paraphrased into something like "to compare to sth. because of its positive qualities", but can anyone think of a precise translation?

Thanks!

[studentyoung]

Can anyone help me with the English translation of 美喻 as a verb/noun? Below is the text in which it appears:

被美喻为广州“市肺”

Perhaps, according to the contexts, you can simply translate the words like, “…is praised as Guangzhou’s “city lung”.

Cheers!

[Hanlink]

被美喻为 - in this phrase, 美喻 is being used as a verb, for which there is no direct, clean translation in English using a verb only, but its meaning is 'make a beautiful anaolgy'. The 被, obviously puts the Chinese phrase into the passive, and the 为 is acting here as the preposition 'as'. I would translate more as: 'has been given the moniker of 'the city's lungs'. It can be very difficult to translate this kind of Chinese into flowing English without losing some of the original 'poetry'. However, if you understand how the structure of the phrase works and how it is made up, you can decide how much of the original to keep.

[Bearboo]

To me "被美喻为" sounds quite awkward though I understand what the author meant by saying this. If I were the author, I would say "被誉为”(is praised as the City Lungs of Guangzhou) or "被形象地称为”（is vividly called 'the City's Lungs）. Native speakers of Chinese seldom use the phrase of "被美喻为" . Instead they use "美誉“ as a noun to express the meaning of "great reputation”. For instance, the sentance we are discussing can be paraphrased as "白云山有着广州‘市肺’的美誉". Though the “美誉”here still sounds a little bit out of place (the collocation is not good), this paraphrased sentence is far better than the original one for at least it is gramatically OK.

[Paolo]

Thanks everybody! The bad thing about that text is, I have to translate some terms for a lexicon, that's why I can't "tergiversate" - as Woody Allen would say - but rather find a synthetic and precise definition of each word... but I'll try to think of something, actually "beautiful analogy" or sth. like that may be quite appropriate. 多谢！

[Hanlink]

A more polished translation always takes a bit of thought, but what about "glorified as' or 'eulogised as', that certainly gets the phrase as a verb and is closer to the 'meaning' of the original.

As Bearboo hints at in his/her reply, not all written Chinese even by native Chinese speakers is good written Chinese. This is the same for any language.