a piece of English news

[Kenny同志]

The news on Rednet.CN

I am just curious. How do you think of this piece of news from a linguistic perspective? It sounds strange at some points along the line, but I can’t tell why.

[doraemon]

Technically, I don't think there's much wrong with this article. It's English is perfectly comprehensible, so it's significantly better than some appallingly translated materials I've read on several occasions.

But if I was to get really pedantic, I do believe some sections of it sound a bit weird. There are some cases of poor and clumsy expression, unusually long sentences (last paragraph :blink: ) and parts which could be worded more aptly so it sounds more 'professional'.

e.g.

Second line: "is scheduled to be kicked off" sounds better as "is scheduled to kick off"

Seventh line: "will be built up" would be better as "will be constructed"

So as I was saying, this article is completely understandable, but some parts could be phrased a little better in my opinion. ;)

[Kenny同志]

Thank you for responding so quickly. Your comment confirmed my suspicion. I agree with you that it’s very comprehensible, but we are all supposed to do better when there’s room for improvement.

[doraemon]

No problem. You could probably better that by a significant margin, right? ^_^

[Kenny同志]

You are kidding me. I am not that 厉害. B)

[James Johnston]

The English in the headline may be understandable, but it is certainly wrong. The adjective 'built up' means something different from the verbs 'built' or 'constructed' which is what they want to say.

[Kenny同志]

James, thank you for pointing that out. 多日不见，可好？

[doraemon]

The English in the headline may be understandable, but it is certainly wrong. The adjective 'built up' means something different from the verbs 'built' or 'constructed' which is what they want to say.

Oh yeah, the title as well...I can't believe I was stupid enough not to see such a large heading. I just sort of launched straight into the text...

[roddy]

I can't remember if I've recommended this to you before Kenny - forgive the oversight if not - but this is essential reading for anyone who works Chinese to English. It's based on government documents so the source material is dull, but the language points stand.

One thing that really stands out to me is a comma shortage. "The project of China’s first underwater town located within Changsha’s West Lake Park" - so there are others elsewhere? There's another one, but some random dictionary pop-up is preventing me from seeing it. Apart from that it's a classic case of translationese, made worse by some bad writing going in I suspect - that last paragraph was surely nonsense to start with. Oh, and you've got some over-enthusiastic use of phrasal verbs - build up, kick off.

[James Johnston]

Roddy, is this the other place where you noticed a shortage of commas?

the underwater town with an area of about 100,000 m2 will be built up on the bottom of the West Lake Culture Park

As it's written, the sentence suggests that other underwater towns of different sizes will be built in other places. There are other things that could be improved too. It should say something like,

the underwater town, which will have an area of about 100,000 m2, will be constructed at the bottom of the lake in West Lake Culture Park.

[Kenny同志]

Roddy, I certainly remember the time when we touched on the book. In fact, I bought the book, and read more than half of it. The insightful points in the book not only benefited my English, but my Chinese as well. I would say without any reserve that it is an instructive book that no Chinese translator who works Chinese into English should miss.

[roddy]

Thought I'd mentioned it.

I'd call it a 100,000m2 underwater town and get rid of that whole clause.