Okay, so I’m trying to quote this passage, and I want it to be a good translation. However, my Chinese friend told me it “wasn’t very fluent Chinese”. She though it meant “friends are always dear”. We were unable to determine if that was because 1: the translation is somewhat lacking, or 2: it’s the bible and it sounds ‘funny’.
So anyone know enough to figure this out? Obviously, in translation there is no one ‘right’ answer, but there definitely are some wrong ones. Any insight would be much appreciated.
Thanks for the input. I’m not actually translating it myself, (not anywhere skilled enough), and I have looked at existing translations. That’s what the translation was from the “Chinese Union Vesion”. The question is: is the Chinse Union translation of the bible any good? My friend is Chinese and she says it doesn’t really make sense, but she has zero familiarity with the bible so I’m not sure if it doesn’t make sense because it’s ‘biblish’ or just not a very good translation.
That’s the translation most commonly in use, but the translation isn’t any good. One of the problem of course is sometimes there’s not a one-to-one translation. For example, “love” can be an intransitive verb in English, but not in Chinese.
The translation isn’t very good… not in the Chinese (putonghua, Mandarin) that is being used today. Whether it make sense in other dialects of Chinese I don’t really know.
The translation came across to me (a native speaker) as unnatural … a failure on the part of the translator perhaps?
The syntax is correct. It’s the vocabulary used.
The translator has opted to use “qin ai” as a verb but “qin ai” is more frequently used as an adjective like “qin ai de mama” (“dear mother”).
The character “nai” is somewhat archaic, and has two functions – one similar to the function of the word “then”, so the sentence reads like “Then the friend loveth …”. The other function, more modern, is like the word “be”, so the sentence could also read “The friend is loving…”. There’s this ambiguity suggested by “nai”
“shi chang” is weird as well. It does not mean “at all time”; instead it means “frequently” or “regularly” as in “wo shichang yundong” (“I exercise regularly”).
My translation of this phrase “A friend loveth at all times” would be “peng2you3 jian1 shi2shi2ke4ke4 xiang1qin1xiang1ai4”.
You may also want to know that the Bible when rendered into Chinese tends to sound weird…why exactly I’m not sure. I guess that the translators would be easily overwhelmed by the task, and the quality falls, and that the translation of such a text would require the translators to be more formal and archaic – but perhaps they were not quite up to the task. The translators would also try to adhere to the sentence structure in the original but often what works in English/Hebrew may not work in Chinese.