I was reading an article today about Jiang Zemin and the expected transfer of power in China in a few months. One of the things Jiang wants to accomplish before stepping down is the inclusion of his contributions to political theory in the Communist Party charter.
His political philosophy is summarized in his work entitled the “Three Represents.” And I’m thinking “WTF?” “Represents” is, to my knowledge, not used as a noun in the English language.
Translation almost always requires interpretation. As a simple example, one doesn’t translate a German sentence into English word for word because, if nothing else, the verb would usually end up in the wrong place. But you can take just about anything in German and translate it into English and get the (nearly) precise concept that was expressed in the original German.
Chinese often doesn’t end up like that. “Three Represents” is just one example of translations from the Chinese I’ve come across that sound stilted or simply wrong.
Is there something about the structure of Chinese that makes accurate translation more difficult? Does Chinese include concepts that are effectively untranslatable into English? Or are the rules for Chinese-English translation archaic and incomplete?
I’ve always wondered why they leave off the definite articles in translations. Or do they? At least, you always hear people leaving off a’s and the’s. But in Latin, where there are no definite articles either, a “the” or “a” is translated in to make it sound better.
My Mandarin is so-so to say the least, however, I’m fluent in Japanese, a language that borrowed most of its vocabulary from Chinese.
Generally, semantic areas of European languages overlap quite nicely; that’s why it’s often possible to translate from German to English to Italian with minimal loss in meaning. However, it’s not always that easy. For instance, there’s no accurate French translation for the word ‘entertainment’. Divertissement? Close but not quite.
When you deal with languages that further away culturally, those close but not quite become a rule rather than an exception. Open up an Mandarin-English, or Japanese-English dictionary and you’ll find most abstract concepts translated by not one word but often three or four. It’s good to think of those as general boundary markers for the real semantic area.
In Chinese, the difference between verb, noun and adjective is much more blurry than in English, which is probably why translations like the one you mentioned tend to be relatively common (at least, that’s my theory).
On a related note … this got me thinking about Engrish, or Japanglish. You know … product labeling that will read “This orange juice manifests new pleasure life to happy you for breakfast.”
Have a look at http://www.engrish.com/images/recentdiscoveries/letsrefresh.jpg . (No, it’s not obscene.) In Japanese, are concepts formed into sentences this way? When Japanese speakers learn English, do they speak this sort of flowery Engrish, or do they just sound a bit awkward like any other ESL speaker?
The quirk with Japanese is that it is a lot more poetic than English. I have lots of trouble translating Japanese into English because direct translations tend to sound very silly and airy-fairy. As you can see at Engrish.com!
I managed to track down the original title of “three represents”, in Mandarin, it reads san ge daibiao. San ge means three, and shure enough daibiao can be translated as “represent.” It can be treated either as a noun or as a verb, clearly, this is where the translator made a (very basic) mistake. Something more English-like might go “The three representatives”, “The three delegates”, or “the three representations” depending on context. Someone with better knowledge of Putonghua is welcome to correct me.
Chinese is more concise than English and doesn’t always have the equivalent of all the different root+endings that we have. The “Represents” here means the verb, but some translators use “Representatives” instead. Either way it’s a condensed slogan referring to Jiang’s theory that the party represents three particular things (I’ll spare you the details).
Chinese love numbering things in this way. In the old days everyone lusted after the “three rounds” (ie, three round status symbols) - a watch, a bicycle (the wheel being the “round”) and something else that escapes me. That was when the party was pushing the “four modernizations”. Etc, etc.
But you’re right. “Three represents” sounds really stupid in English.
At least it’s pluralized. I often hear Asian immigrants of all ethnicities use the singular form when referring to multiple objects. “I have ten dollar.” "“I have two network card.” Do Asian languages lack the plural form of nouns?
Chinese doesn’t have an plural, or tenses (no alternate forms, that is), for that matter. I would argue that Chinese “translating badly” is more due to a crappy translator than the language itself. Some people get too caught up with the character form of the language, and end up translating each word, leaving a garbled mess.
I have many Japanese friends and have volunteered as a conversation partner for Japanese ESL students in my town, and have never heard a Japanese person speak like that.
The thing about most of these comic examples of “Engrish” is that they are the result of translation, not of non-native English speakers forming their own English phrases. Translations almost always sound awkward, but people with a reasonable degree of fluency in a language do not speak by forming a complete thought in their native language and then translating it to a second language.
Asian languages are not all related, so I would be greatly surprised if this were really true of Asian immigrants of all ethnicities. However, Japanese and AFAIK the various Chinese dialects do not have a seperate plural noun form.
I remember one Japanese friend of mine being very frustrated about English plurals. She thought they were redundant. “Why do you have to say it’s plural? People should be able to tell!” I guess she had a point – “ten dollar” or “two network card” obviously refers to more than one object even without the plural noun form.
One of the fascinating things about studying a language very different from one’s own is the realization of how little is really necessary to communicate at a basic level. Japanese, which I studied for five years, lacks gendered words, articles, and plurals. (One of the big sellers when I was there was titled something like “‘That,’ ‘The’ and ‘A’” - an extraordinarily difficult set of concepts to get across when there’s no direct translation.) Conversely, English lacks levels of diction, gendered speech, and an absolutely marvelous grammatical mood called the “suffering passive,” which lets you express “I was sat down next to on the bus by Carrot Top and I suffered” all in a brief clause.
Wouldn’t it be iteresting to devise a sort of super-Esperanto, the distilled essence of communication? Of course, the problem is that language is bound with culture - so we’d have to agree on that first…
“Three Represents” is simply wrong. I’m learning Chinese, and from the original pinyin you quoted, i know it better translates as “Three Delegates”. Probably the translator’s English is not so great (or they were simply using some translation software)
In my opinion, there is NO language called ‘Chinese’. Chinese is a group of languages…
I knew this but for those who don’t believe me, here is what Websters says:
“2 : a group of related languages used by the people of China that are often mutually unintelligible in their spoken form but share a single system of writing and that constitute a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.”
But plural forms make it easy to refer to a plurality without a number. Suppose there is a stack of network cards on the table, I don’t know how many, and I want you to hand them to me. With plurals, I say “hand me the network cards” and you know to hand me all of them. Without plurals, I say “hand me the network card” and the context doesn’t really provide a clue as to how many I want.
(Of course, in this case you could also say “hand me all the network card”. Just goes to show there is more than one way of doing things. But there are obviously cases where plural forms are not redundant.)
I studied Chinese very briefly in college and was horrible at it. However, I was very good at asking questions and learned a lot about the differences in languages. It helped that my teacher, a woman from Taiwan, spoke 7 languages fluently.
She said that in Chinese, you spoke in “pictures”. Where you can say “good morning” in English everyday for your entire life, in Chinese you would say, “The sun behind your face makes the day special” and tomorrow you would say, “The joy of happiness will be yours” and so on. I told her these phrases sounded like what you read on fortune cookies. She said that in essence, that was true and thus it made translation difficult. It was hard to go word-for-word with a series of pictoral concepts that varied by speaker, region and by interpretation. A different intonation of a word can change a meaning drastically.
On our last day of school, she gave me a poem in Chinese.
I had her translate it:
Two clouds meet, and for a time they are one - and then they drift apart again.
I asked her how she would translate it tomorrow.
Without skipping a beat, she smiled and said:
The sky and the earth move in two directions, and for a time, they are above and below - and then they go on their journey.
I didn’t learn the language from her, but I think I grasped the concept.
DMark, that sounds highly exaggerated. While classical Chinese is certainly open to lots of interpretation (one Chinese guy I know is still trying to deciper the 10 character poem he has on his wall), ordinary language is, well, ordinary.
To say good morning, you say “zao an”. Or sometimes “zao can” (I may be misremembering that one), or sometimes simply “zao”. I’m sure you could say all sorts of things, but I doubt people are going to put that much effort into saying good morning. While certain phrases may seem highly stylized, I’m sure English seems the same way to those that are learning it, especially when you get into slang and idioms.
As with any very foreign language, translation requires a lot of rewording. “zao an” means “early peace”. I’d translate that as “have a peaceful morning” or simply “good morning”.
Early in the twentieth century, lots of American poets (well, two that I know of) tried to bring in and translate Chinese poems. So many of them concentrated on the “pictoral” nature of the characters, without knowing what the characters really meant. While it’s true that Chinese is made up of radicals, in which some look like things like a little man, or a mouth, etc – to say that every character has some enhanced literal or poetic definition/derivation behind it is a huge exaggeration. A lot of characters have radicals, mostly for the the purposes of pronunciation.
Dai biao, in that context, I may translate as “representations.” Still sounds awkward, though.
Like it or not, the English edition of People’s Daily likes the sound of it…
*The drive in the countryside to study “Three Represents” thought of President Jiang Zemin has brought substantial benefits to China’s rural population, a conference in Hangzhou was told Monday.
The “Three Represents” thought calls for the Chinese Communist Party to represent the development trend of China’s advanced social productive forces, the orientation of China’s advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people of China. *
“Three Delegates” is not right. Jiang wasn’t speaking of persons but ideas. handy,
There is a written form of Chinese while there are several dozen spoken dialect at least. DMark,
Even though Chinese poetry is more pictoral and flexible than ordinary written prose there is not that much room. I suspect she pulled a fast one on you.
