Practical Translation Project Design - Translation > Stage 5 > Step 2 > Task 3
  Analyze Case Three

Read the following excerpt of a rationale and try to find out in what way it can be improved. Please write your answer in the space provided.

The following rationale is from a book named “A Practical Course Book on Translation” edited by Feng Qinghua (1995).

“Choosing the sense of a word” is on Page 22 of the book. It tells us “Many meanings and part speeches of a word are language phenomena of both English and Chinese. After knowing sentence structure of original text in daily translation practice, be sure to pay attention to choose the meaning and part speech of the key word in the sentence.” Polysemy is a language phenomenon shared by both English and Chinese. This requires the translator, either decoding the source language or encoding the target language, to exercise careful judgments about all the possible meanings of a word. While doing so, s/he can rely on certain contextual clues to help make a sensible choice. Such a decision-making process is termed by Feng Qinghua (冯庆华) as “choosing the sense of a word” (Feng, 1995:22).

“Extending the meaning of a word” is on Page 24 and it says “When translating English into Chinese, we often come across this kind of problems: some words are hard to be translated into proper Chinese words, if we translate them directly from the meanings in the dictionary, we can make the translation uninteresting and even changed. We must base our translation on the original meaning, according to the whole text and choose exact Chinese words to extend the meaning.” Here is an example: “It is all very well, again, to have a tiger in the tank, but to have one in the driver’s seat is another matter altogether.” Translation is that “当然油箱里装满优质汽油到是好事,但是驾驶室里要是坐着横冲直撞的司机就完全是另一回事了。” The tiger’s original meaning is “老虎”, but extends to“标号高的优质汽油” in this sentence.

 

“Changing parts of speech” tells us “In English-Chinese translating process, some parts of speech in the original text should be changed when translating, otherwise Chinese meaning can't be clear or coherent” is on Page 36 of the book.



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