Could anyone please help in translating Chinese to English?

[Ho Fun]

[honglam]

I always ask for the origin first since the context matters a lot when extracting the meanings. So where did you get this 对联-like sentence?

对联 or 楹联, or approximately "poetic couplets" tend to use classical expressions and the corresponding characters between sentences(known as 上联 and 下联) have similar grammatical function and relative meaning. As there's no background information now I could only state my interpretation of it.

 

五知纯祖武: 五 literally means "five", due to the lack of origin and the comparison of the two sentence, I prefer the idea that here it means "(someone) at the age of five". 知 is a verb meaning "to know, knowing". As for "纯祖武", I know that "绳其祖武" is a chengyu taken from 诗经. Here 绳 is loangraph of 承, which means "to inherit, to carry on". 其 is a pronoun, meaning "his/her/their" here. 祖 stands for "ancestors" and 武 stands for "footprint". So literally "绳其祖武" describes that someone's "carrying on his ancestors' footprint.", which means "following the path of one's ancestors". I think it could be an error here. The author may had 绳 and 纯 messed up, since I don't have an impression of seeing "纯其祖武". Besides, pronouns like 其 are sometimes emitted when there are rhythmic restrictions. So the whole sentence said "(he/she), at the age of five, (became) knowing to follow the path of his/her ancestors".

三能绍宗风: Similarly, 三 literally means "three", standing for "(someone) at the age of three" I guess. 能 is a verb of "to be competent to". 绍 has similar meaning as 绳 above, meaning to "inherit and carry forward". 宗 means "clan", and 风 means "ethos". So it means "(he/she), at the age of three, had the competence to inherit and carry forward the ethos of his/her clan".

 

This 对联 seems to be describing someone's childhood, but some background info influence the exact interpretation a lot, so I hope you may give some further details about when and where you saw these sentences.

 

BTW, 風 is traditional Chinese character. 风 I used in my answer is the corresponding simplified version of it.