thinking chinese translation a course in translation method chinese to english

[...]... the what-who-why-where-how of translation: destiny The translation of a text is destined for certain readers in certain places, doing certain things It has a destination and a destiny It may be destined for an overworked divorce lawyer, or, if it is a translation of great canonical literature such as Ba Jin’s (Family) it may be destined for immortality Bearing in mind that translations have changed... have followed the same pathways and networks in the Chinese- speaking and English- speaking brain may need to follow the same syntactic pathway on the page Perhaps it is patronising to point out to highly literate translators that paragraphs are also part of the structure of a text We need to think about the respective role that paragraphs play in Chinese and English text and the differing roles that... translator training (whether this is class-room training or self-training) is the ability to think outside the text and to think ‘with both sides of the brain’ As a wordsmith, the translator may be expected to be using those areas of the brain associated with language and serial processing In addition, and perhaps contrary to expectation, the translator must use areas of the brain which deal with spatial... ‘internal radio’ It helps to be able to summon up cerebral sensations of aromas and flavours Telling a British or American readership how a Chinese machine works, the patent translator must have a haptic knowledge of movements like stirring, grinding, and spinning A Chinese pain that feels ‘sour’ is probably felt by a British patient as a ‘dull ache’ The translator must feel that sour pain as a Chinese patient... Chinese- English translation by scholars and translators who are not native speakers of Chinese Chinese text books on translation are thorough, painstaking and in the main accurate But they tend towards the prescriptive, the detailed, and even the pedantic Some scholars feel that what has passed for theory in translation scholarship in China has tended to be critical evaluation rather than the formulation of... scene in mainland China in about 2002, having been used in Taiwan for some time, but now bearing a new, ideologically portentous meaning Like many Chinese abbreviations it carries a weight of implication, and moreover, at the time it was a rather novel idea that ordinary Chinese people could build up monetary and material wealth, and that the Chinese government would encourage them Translators and interpreters... want to use, instead, a full stop in an English translation (a more detailed account of Chinese and English punctuation is given in Chapter 2) Much has been written about Chinese paratactical sentences and English hypotactical sentences, variously evoked as ‘towering trees’, ‘bamboo sticks’ and ‘bunches of grapes’ (Tan 1995: 482), ‘building blocks’ and ‘chains’ (Liu 1990) The translator can learn a. .. which all teachers of translation, and probably quite a few students of translation, are familiar But schema operates in a wider way It implies being in and with the writer and the reader We must understand both, ducking and diving, boxing and coxing, in such a way that the rabbit becomes a dove and the sawn -in- half lady becomes whole again Fortunately for the modern English- speaking linguist, with around... may be an important clue, first to reading with understanding, and then to tackling the translation A title is the apex of a hierarchical system of headings Each heading acts as a signpost or label for a chapter or a section, and guides the reader through an increasingly focused text The immediate functions of a title are to identify, to indicate the type and character of the content, to summarise and... privilege and the responsibility to translate Chinese into English that will ‘speak’ to Anglophone and international audiences in the way that Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley did before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China That responsibility entails thinking our way into the mind of the Chinese writer 4 Introduction and their intended Chinese- speaking audience Steiner calls this ‘penetration’ . Head of Translation and Interpreting Studies. Thinking Chinese Translation Thinking Arabic Translation A course in translation method: Arabic to English James Dickins, Sándor Hervey and Ian. Higgins Thinking German Translation A course in translation method: German to English Sándor Hervey, Ian Higgins and Michael Loughridge Thinking Italian Translation A course in translation method. pub- lishing translations. Major aspects of teaching and learning translation, such as collaboration, are also covered. Thinking Chinese Translation is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and