General feedback on translations

[Demonic_Duck]

6 minutes ago, anonymoose said:

But that's what the author has done.

 

Ahh I see, you're right — I mis-parsed it as referring to "in many countries".

[Kenny同志]

Thank you all folks. I appreciate your help very much. 

 

I always think that Chinese>English translation should be done and taught by only native-English speakers and some of the best Chinese translators who are truly bilingual. This is really not something I can take on. ?

[Demonic_Duck]

22 minutes ago, Kenny同志 said:

I always think that Chinese>English translation should be done and taught by only native-English speakers and some of the best Chinese translators who are truly bilingual. This is really not something I can take on. ?

 

I've done Chinese-to-English translation myself (monolingually-raised native English speaker) and also worked alongside other translators, most of whom were monolingually-raised native Chinese speakers. The best of them weren't able to produce truly "native-like" English, but that didn't mean their translations were bad or worthless. On the contrary, many times they could capture nuances in the source that I would have totally missed. Working together, them translating and me editing, we could produce better and faster results than either of us could individually. And for lower-priority copy that didn't need to be so polished, they could easily do a good-enough job without needing my help at all.

 

Don't put yourself down Kenny! I'd rank your Chinese-to-English translations as on a par with some of the best I've worked with, which is no small feat.

[Kenny同志]

Thank you for saying this to me, Demonic Duck. That's really kind of you. ?

 

 

[Guest realmayo]

23 hours ago, Kenny同志 said:

In my view, this is a problem with the Chinese, which is written in what I call the New Speak. A hallmark of this engineered language is that it tries to sound important by using a lot of adjectives, adverbs, and ridiculously complex constructions that are absolutely dispensable.

 

Personally I really do not enjoy reading this style of Chinese. Do you know of any resources that descibe this phenomenon, either by giving examples, or by explaining when/why it started? I would love to understand more about whether its origin is very recent, or came in with in Communism, or pre-1949 Westernisation, or May 4th Baihua movement. I guess it's not a feature of late Qing written Chinese? And are you referring to the type of language which often occurs in e.g. newspaper articles too, or just self-consciously 'official' language?

I have a feeling I asked you this before and you directed me to a web post in Chinese but I was too lazy to try to read/understand it.

[Kenny同志]

A number of books I recommend if you want to know more about this type of language and how to transform it into good Chinese: 

 

陳雲（陳雲係筆名，作者本名陳雲根）：《中文解毒》、《執正中文》
古德明：《中華正聲》、《真假中文》
Ji Fengyuan: 《Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao's China》

Warning: The above Chinese books are available only in traditional script.  

 

Having said that, I would also recommend the following if you want to be able to write good Chinese: 
思果：《翻譯研究》、《翻譯新究》、《譯道探微》
余光中：《翻譯乃大道》

 

 

Disclaimer: 諸位有欲購上列書籍者，宜先閱其預覽頁，然後決定購買與否。由於書籍不合脾胃而造成經濟損失，Kenny同志不負責啊。
 

[roddy]

On 9/19/2020 at 11:23 AM, realmayo said:

I would love to understand more about whether its origin is very recent, or came in with in Communism, or pre-1949 Westernisation, or May 4th Baihua movement.

An interesting exercise would be to look at regular government / Party documents (Government work reports， the 中央一号文件s) and see how they've changed over the years.