confusing subtitle （除了。。。之外)

[三百]

大家好！我第一的帖子。
I came across this subtitle in a Shaw Brothers movie (叉手-1981) that is really confusing me.

 

After the 3 chiefs (凌云志,梁荣,方祖光) of the evil gang have just done away with our hero,  Chief 凌 says to the other two chiefs:

 

"看样子，除了梁荣的身份
对方好像没有觉察之外
我和方兄的行藏可能已经泄露"

 

"Looks like they've already found out
our identities except for Liang Rong's.
They know about us."

 

Bear with me as I explain the plot a little. The hero and his compatriots have suspected 凌 and 方 to be two of the gang chiefs, but do not know about 梁荣, who has actually defected from the good side.

 

So the English subtitle makes sense. The Chinese subtitle is not a typo as it matches the Mandarin audio. But it sounds to me like it has the opposite meaning of the English, akin to:

 

"...except for Liang Rong's identity, it seems the others AREN'T aware..."

 

Is someone able to explain this please? 谢谢！

[Apollys]

It is a little weird in text, I think this may be best understandable as the non-standard sentence structure that appears in spoken language.  Like when I speak English, I often interject ideas in sentences in what may not be completely grammatically proper or standard ways.  This type of sentence written out, especially without punctuation, may be weird to understand.  But when someone speaks it, you can hear what's going on structurally.

 

Or maybe this is just acceptable within the flexilbity of Chinese grammar, I'm certainly not an expert on that. I'm constantly confused by native speakers telling me what seemingly ridiculous sentence structures are "correct" or "okay".

 

So in this phrase what's happening is 对方好像没有觉察 is modifying 梁荣的身份.  The word order makes this confusing, but the verbal delivery may help clarify the point.

[roddy]

Does this terribly clumsy but more literal translation of the Chinese help? 

 

It looks like [apart from Liang Rong's identity, which the enemy has not yet found out], my and Fang's cover is blown.

 

I'd say the confusion perhaps arises from slightly odd phrasing in the Chinese. The 除了 X 之外 makes you expect that X will in some way be a part of whatever follows. "除了 John 之外, the whole family was there". If the last Chinese line was "all us gang chiefs have been identified" it would be fine.  It could also have been phrased to avoid the sort-of-repetition of 'identity [not] found out' and 'cover blown'.  除了梁荣之外,我们仨的行藏...

[三百]

大家的回复谢谢！ The more I looked at the entire Chinese subtitle alone, instead of trying to match the English and Chinese subtitles clause for clause, the more it made sense.

 

ALL of the pattern sentences of the 除了。。。以外 construction that I have seen just have simple noun phrases contained in it, never a whole modified clause.

 

So when I hear 除了, the noun phrase immediately following it (梁荣的身份) will be excepted by my brain from whatever verb follows next (没有觉察). I don't pay attention to 以外/之外 because it's commonly omitted.

 

When 没有觉察 hits my ears, my brain interprets this as：

 

"...except for Liang Rong's identity, it seems the others AREN'T aware..."

 

instead of

 

"...except for Liang Rong's identity WHICH the others aren't aware of...".

 

The "sneaky" appearance of 之外 at the end fooled me.

 

Any psycholinguistics scholars out there know the proper term for this kind of "faulty prediction"/"delayed ambiguity" in grammar? I got terribly sidetracked and found research about nested sentence structures, parsing and predictions,  pattern identification, etc. Interesting but I have to spend more time on Chinese!

 

Here's what I briefly looked at, if you want to know:
Delayed interpretation, shallow processing and constructions: the basis of the "interpret whenever possible" principle. Philippe BLACHE, 2017
Memory Limitations and Structural Forgetting: The Perception of Complex Ungrammatical Sentences as Grammatical. Edward GIBSON & James THOMAS, 1999
On length and structure in sentence parsing. Gary MILSARK, 1983

 

Analysis aside, the main thing I care about is: is this the way a modern, fluent (not necessarily native) speaker would say it?
We all agree the construction odd. I'm not sure if it's due to the mish-mash of a Hong Kong studio dubbing a film in Mandarin, or the (Qing?) era it takes place in.
If it is indeed a common thing for Chinese to use constructions like this, then my listening comprehension has an even longer way to go.

 

[Apollys]

The general lesson to learn here is that you will have to get used to the fact that Chinese does not have a word for "which" or "that".  (This has been one of my biggest grammatical obstacles with writing Chinese myself, it seems like such a gaping omission in the language's grammar which forces us into ambiguous or clunky structures.)

 

In formal writing that simply means that all modifiers must come before the thing they modify：除了（对方没有觉察到的）梁荣的身份之外，。。。 However, Chinese people will tell you this construction is 不好听 so they probably wouldn't write it like that at all.

 

In conversation, people often simply place the modifier after the thing being modified, as if there were an invisible "that" interjected there.  As far as I'm aware, this is not "correct" for formal writing (though I'm not sure), but it can be understood as: 除了梁荣的身份 that 对方没有觉察到 之外，。。。

[EnergyReaper]

9 hours ago, 三百 said:

The "sneaky" appearance of 之外 at the end fooled me.

I found an interesting example from the eposide 2 of Secret Society of Men (2011) — 从我们生下来的那一天起， 除了我们的父母不能选择，因为那在我们生下来之前就已经存在的。之外，所有的一切都可以选择。

[三百]

EnergyReaper,

我放弃了。I understand all the words, and all four fragments, but not sure about the whole meaning. 翻译一下吗？

 

As a native Chinese speaker, could you please comment on the original subtitle:

"看样子，除了梁荣的身份
对方好像没有觉察之外
我和方兄的行藏可能已经泄露"

 

Specifically, the degree of how natural it sounds. Do you think it's how a modern speaker would say it?

The English subtitle sounds totally natural but if you translate the Chinese subtitle to English as Roddy did above, there is a sense of redundancy or wordiness, to our ears anyway.

 

而且，I just noticed now. If I just get rid of 除了 altogether, it sounds kind of okay:

 

"看样子，梁荣的身份
对方好像没有觉察
我和方兄的行藏可能已经泄露"

 

Why even use it at all?!

 

[EnergyReaper]

4 hours ago, 三百 said:

Specifically, the degree of how natural it sounds. Do you think it's how a modern speaker would say it?

It sounds natural to me, like I might say 除了篮球他不太会打之外，其它夏季奥运会的球类项目他都有职业运动员的水平

But some native Chinese speakers feel 除了...之外 is a weird structure. You can find some people ask about it.

Sometimes I am also confused about it. Below is an example from 2006年高考广东卷语文试题:

 

[EnergyReaper]

5 hours ago, 三百 said:

"看样子，梁荣的身份
对方好像没有觉察
我和方兄的行藏可能已经泄露"

I prefer to say 看样子，梁荣的身份对方好像没有觉察, 而我和方兄的行藏可能已经泄露

If you feel confused about 除了...之外, a simple way is to use other patterns.

[Apollys]

I don't think the problem here is about 除了。。。之外 itself, but the fact that there's a verb phrase after the noun but inside the 除了。。。之外.

 

Certainly 除了。。。之外 is not a completely illegitimate sentence structure.

 

And I'm not sure about the advice to turn one's head the other way whenever one doesn't understand   We're here to learn.