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(Paid Yearly) Advertisement as a Writing Style
and Strategies for its Translation
A writing style refers to the linguistic characteristics of a particular
text. Advertisement, as a wring style, is characterized mainly by
these aspects: concision, clarity, frequent use of comparative and
superlative constructions, neologism, repetition, non-sophistication,
promise function and application of rhetorical devices (traditionally,
figures of speech). Since the main purpose of advertisement is to
send out a message to the public or consumers to promote the sale
of a product or service…
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Chinese menu translation
With the 2008 Beijing Olympic coming soon, China is faced with a
serious problem - how to express their culture clearly through accurate
Chinese translation. Dish translation is one of the utmost important
aspects pertaining to conveying Chinese culture…
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An Integrated Approach to the Translation
of Special Terms
The translation of special terms is an unavoidable problem. This
paper attempts to propose an integrated approach to solve the problem.
On the basis of some basic knowledge about terminology, a translator
should search the corpora of the source language and target language
to find the usage of the term and its possible translation in its
own linguistic context. Then, only after the consideration of the
specific domain can a linguistic choice be made on the translation
of the term. In explaining this integrated approach, we use the
Chinese semi-term "lüse shipin" (green food) as an example,
and propose several tentative translations of this term…
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Chinese Translation
The most common pitfall of the Chinese language is whether to use
Simplified or Traditional Chinese or both. This is the first thing
the client needs to specify when requesting a Chinese translation.
There are two different categories of written Chinese…
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Voice Changes in Translation - A
Comparative Study of Active and Passive Voice in Chinese and English
Voice is a grammatical category of verbs that is related to what
thing or person is acting and what thing or person is being acted
upon (Crystal, 1997). A verb is in the active voice when used to
talk about what people and things do; verbs in the passive voice
describe what is done to things (Swan, 1995). According to Swan,
not all verbs can be expressed in the passive voice, for example
die, arrive and have are all inherently active…
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Writing About Writing: A review of
Visible Speech, a book about Chinese by John de Francis
Visible Speech is in many ways a sequel to the author's earlier
"The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy." But where the previous
work concentrated on a single language, this new one sets out far
more ambitiously to account for all written forms of language everywhere
with a single all-embracing theory…
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A Journey into Chinese-English Environmental
Translation
One of the great pleasures—and occasionally frustrations—in translation
is hunting for translations of new words and unfamiliar terminology.
It can be like a journey—you begin in one place, follow some false
trails, backtrack a bit, and then stumble into a goldmine. Along
the way you learn all about things that you'd never even thought
existed before, some very useful, and some positively abstract.
This article presents some of my own small journeys, tracking down
English translations for Chinese words and phrases in the environmental
field. I touch on a few common issues, such as misleading dictionary
entries, words that don't appear in the dictionaries at all, and
region-specific words. The range of topics covers geomorphology
(the study of landforms), climatology, and general environmental
terminology…
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Translation of Numerals Between English and Chinese
Numerals, initially intended
to express precise quantities, are predictably, precise in nature.
However, in their actual usage in discourse, they are often associated
with the feature of fuzziness, especially when used rhetorically.
By comparing and contrasting past translated materials between English
and Chinese, the present author reveals more differences than similarities
of correspondence of numerals in different languages and finds that
this phenomenon involves not only linguistic but also historical
and cultural elements. On the basis of comprehensive data, this
paper proposes six strategies in dealing with translation of numerals,
namely, a. mirror translation; b. use of equivalents; c. free translation;
d. explanatory translation; e. hieroglyph translation and f. creative
translation…
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Translating Publicity Texts in the Light of the Skopos Theory:
Problems and Suggestions
The present paper aims
to explore the activity of translating Chinese publicity texts into
English within the framework of the skopos theory, with special
reference to Shaoxing mingshi culture-related texts. First, the
basic principles of the skopos theory are outlined, followed by
a discussion of their application in translating publicity texts.
An attempt is then made to analyze four types of translation errors
prevalent in English translations of publicity texts by drawing
on Nord's functional model. The paper concludes with some suggestions
to solve the problems…
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SARS or ATP - A Misnomer in Mainland China
This paper is intended
to deal with the distinction between two important translated terms
widely used internationally, particularly in mainland China in recent
weeks. The disease SARS has been referred as ATP, instead of SARS,
in mainland China for some untold political reasons and nationalistic
fixations…
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