Strategies
1. Accommodate to target linguistic conventions.
a. Not a word for a word
Defined loosely, the word is the smallest unit of language that can be used by itself. (Bolnger and Sears, 1968: 43) Mona Baker defines the written word as any sequence of letters with an orthographic space on either side. (Baker, 1992: 11) In Chinese, the character instead of the word is used. Yet the above definitions apply just all right. Nevertheless, between English and Chinese differences are many and the shackles of a word for a word must be broken. To be more specific, the English word may be translated as a Chinese phrase and similarly a Chinese character may need an English phrase or sentence to express its meaning adequately and appropriately. For instance, duibuqi (three characters) can be translated into ‘Sorry” whereas ‘incredible’ and ‘ignorant’ are usually translated as bukesiyi and yumeiwuzhi respectively (Both are four-character phrases).
b. Accommodate to collocation in target language
‘Why do builders not produce a building or authors not invent a novel, since they do invent stories and plots? No reasons as far as dictionary definitions of words are concerned. We don’t say it because we don’t say it.’ (Bolnger and Sears, 1968: 55) This is quite true in Chinese as well. We acquire them rather than learn them as in learning a foreign or second language. Most problems arise in Chinese translations owing to different collocations in different languages. For example, rules are broken in English but only weifan(violated or not abided by ) in Chinese.
c. Lexicalization with necessary annotation
By lexicalizaiton we mean to invent a new word or phrase for something that does not exit in the target language. The meaning may yet fail to be conveyed, so it is necessary for us to append an explanation immediately thereafter. For example, we Chinese do not have a habit to drink afternoon tea. Moreover tea is just tea and we drink only tea without eating any snacks. When I was invited to have afternoon tea by my English friend Andre, I was surprised to find I was offered biscuits and things. This posed a problem when I related the story to my students for I could not simply translate it as xiawucha (a literal Chinese translations). I had to explain. Morning tea similarly is quite different from zaocha in the Cantonese community.
d. Accommodate to target sentential structure
One ancient foreigner recalled his experience in learning Chinese, saying that the Chinese do not have obvious formal connections between sentences and clauses. It is true especially in the ancient Chinese transcript which even do not have a punctuation system. Full stop is merely used to indicate the end of a sentence. Sometimes full stops are not seen. But we were taught to read that and it did not seem to matter to the people of that time. The modern Chinese adopted the western punctuation system but many features of the ancient times remain. The Chinese clauses are connected through meaning while English uses functional words to string them together. Another significant distinction is that English is subject-prominent while Chinese is topic-prominent.(Li, 1976) In Chinese-English Chinese translations, proper subjects must be identified for each clause for subjectless clause is grammatically wrong in English. In English-Chinese Chinese translationss many subjects can be omitted and the clauses can be rearranged into a string of clause led by a general topic.
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