A Brief Overview of the Chinese Language and Chinese Translation Theory
A - Alphabet
Written Chinese is NOT based on an alphabet or syllabary. Instead, Chinese characters are logograms consisting of an arrangement of distinctive strokes written in a particular order.B - Beijing
Beijing is the capital city of the People's Republic of China. The "Standard Spoken Chinese" or "Standard Mandarin" was developed using the Beijing dialect as a basis. It is taught at schools around the country and serves as a means of communication between people from different regions of China.C - Cantonese
Cantonese is a dialect spoken by people from the southern parts of China, including Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau. It is popular outside China due to the large number of Chinese diaspora from Southern China. Contrary to popular misunderstanding outside of China, Cantonese is NOT a form of written Chinese as the characters are written in the same manner as in any other dialect.D - Dialect
The Chinese language is spoken with a large number of different dialects around the country, some of which are so distinct that they are mutually unintelligible. The written form of the language, however, remains the same. Traditional Chinese classification lists seven dialect groups, which are Gan, Guan (Mandarin or Beifang), Kejia (Hakka), Min (including the Hokkien and Taiwanese variants), Wu (including Shanghainese), Xiang, Yue (Cantonese). Each group can be further divided into sub-classifications with subtle variances. In order to facilitate effective communications throughout the country, "Standard Mandarin" was developed, based on the Beijing (Guan) dialect.E - Equivalence in Translation
Equivalence remains an essential part in the practice, assessment and study of translation. Interestingly, there are plenty of times when we are able to find complete semantic equivalence between Chinese and English. Here goes a number of examples: 'fish in troubled water' can be 'directly' translated into its Chinese equivalence as '混水摸鱼'. 'Practice makes perfect' equals to '熟能生巧'. '恶事传千里' can be instantly transferred into 'Bad news travels fast' in English. As a matter of fact, this sort of correspondence can often be found in such rhetorical expressions as idioms, proverbs and aphorism. Coincidentally, it is also in these types of expressions that misunderstanding and miscommunications sometimes take place. If one looks at the phrase 'measure for measure' from the surface meaning, one might well translate it into something near 'give out one thing in return for another', such as '以牙还牙' (which literally means "a tooth for a tooth").Now, here lies a common problem: we can apply our logic and ways of thought to interpret proverbs, idioms or aphorisms from another language. In this case, a complete and perfect transmission of form-content correspondence of the ST (Source Text) to the TT (Target Text) would be impossible. If any key information in the content of schemata functions as a decisive cue for a certain schema connection, the translator should preserve it. In this situation, since there is a significant difference in cognitive environment, the object employed in the expression is 'measure', which will render meaningless if the translator insists on using the original meaning, as '办法' or '方法'. The translator should not hesitate to give up the original object as cue in order to aim at conveying a high degree of the same dynamics between the target text and its readers as the original text does. Instead, the translator comes up with the new object to achieve this: '针锋相对'. Such alteration is inevitable in the translation of set phrases, proverbs and idioms, etc.
In a word, translation equivalence should be understood in terms of broad textual characteristics, rather than mere word-to-word or sentence-to-sentence equivalences.
F - Fu Lei
Fu Lei is one of China's most recognized translators. He developed his own translation theory. He held that translation is like painting: what is essential is not formal resemblance but rather spiritual resemblance.G - Glyph
Chinese characters are glyphs whose parts may depict various objects or represent abstract notions. These parts may stand alone to form independent characters, or more frequently, combined to form compound characters based on certain principles such as logical aggregation and phonetics.H - Hanzi
The majority of the Chinese population (about 92%) belong to the Han ethnicity. Chinese characters are also known as "Hanzi", which literally translates to "characters of the Han".I - Idioms
The Chinese language is full of idioms which carry the wisdoms of the ancient civilisation. Most of these expressions consist of four characters and are derived from ancient literature. The meaning of these idioms usually surpasses the sum of the meanings carried by the four characters, as they are often intimately linked with the myth, story or historical fact from which they were derived. As such, the idioms do not necessarily follow the conventional grammatical structure and syntax of modern Chinese and are instead highly compact and synthetic. Often the four characters reflect the moral behind the story rather than the story itself.J - Japanese
Some Chinese characters are used in the Japanese written language. These imported characters, called Kanji in Japanese, are used for the most part to represent Japanese words with the corresponding meaning, rather than pronunciations.K - Korean
At one time, many Chinese characters (called hanja in Korean) were introduced into Korean for their meaning, just as in Japanese. However, modern day written Korean relies almost exclusive on a phonetic script.L - Layout
Chinese characters conform to a roughly square frame and are not canonically linked to each other. Therefore, they can be written in any direction in a square grid. Traditionally, Chinese is written in vertical columns from the top to the bottom, with the columns running from the right to the left. In modern times, the familiar Western layout of horizontal rows from left to right, read from the top of the page to the bottom, has become more popular, especially in the People's Republic of China, with the rise of Vernacular Chinese. However, it is still common to see shop signs and restaurant menus written in the traditional layout.M - Mandarin
Standard Mandarin is the official spoken language of China. It was developed on the basis of the Beijing dialect to facilitate communication between people from different parts of the country whose native dialects may be otherwise mutually unintelligible. Standard Mandarin is taught in schools across China, including Hong Kong and Macau. Therefore, modern educated Chinese can speak both Mandarin and their regional dialects.In recent years, the Mandarin Level Evaluation Exam has become very popular. People who are unable to pass a certain score in the exam are not considered for certain occupations, such as TV hosts, public school teachers, and pubic servants. What needs to be pointed out is that while a large number of the Chinese people do not speak Standard Mandarin with standard pronunciation due to different geographical, age and educational backgrounds, spoken Standard Mandarin is almost understood by everyone.
N - Noun
When it comes to nouns, there are two major differences between the Chinese language and many other languages of the world.First, there are no plural forms for nouns in Chinese. A particular counter should be added in front of the noun when specifying the numbers of a countable noun. In addition, the counter has to agree with the noun. For example, we say "三辆车" for three cars, with "辆"serving as the measure word for "cars".
Second, unlike most of the Indo-European languages, nouns in Chinese are gender-neutral. As in English, all the objects are neutral. However, when referring to people, if one wants to specify the gender of a particular person, for example, a female actor ('actress' in English), he needs to add the root for "female" (女) to the front of the word "actor" (演员).
O - Official Language
Chinese is the official language of China. It is also one of the four official languages of Singapore and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.P - Pinyin
Pinyin is a system developed to represent the sounds of standard Mandarin using the Latin alphabet along with a few diacritical marks (which represent the tone). Pin means "spell" and yin means "sound". For the most part, Pinyin uses vowel letters in much the same way as they are used in Romance languages. Most pinyin consonants are similar to English. However, Pinyin also uses some letters or diagraphs, such as "q", "x" and "zh", that do not correspond to spellings in other languages that are written in the Latin alphabet. This is a vestige of pinyin's Cyrillic heritage.Q - Quality Translation
How to achieve a quality translation? There has been a misunderstanding that any one who can speak two languages is capable of translating. While being equally proficient in two languages is already hard enough, it actually takes more than expertise in languages to ensure a high quality translation. Like the famous translation theorist Peter Newmark points out, the translating activity can be likened to an iceberg. The tip is the translation: what is written on the paper and thus visible. The iceberg - the activity - is all the work that is done, often ten times as much again, much of which you do not even use.The transcoding (decoding, recoding and encoding) process should be focused not merely on language transfer but also—and most importantly—on cultural transposition. In short, as an inevitable consequence of the previous statement, the translator must be both bilingual and bicultural, if not indeed multicultural.
Therefore, the setting up of themes and plans equivalent to the ST reader's response is always culture and context-bound, as well as language bound. It means that reproduction of sentences bearing equivalent dynamics should be free from any clashes of language and culture which are all included in the reader's schematic assumptions.
R - Radicals
Radicals are the semantic components of Chinese characters. A semantic component or element of a character is the portion or one of several portions which contribute meaning to the character, as opposed to phonetic information. For example, objects related to wood (such as tree names, forest, bridge) consist of a radical which carries the meaning of wood. All objects related to water have a water radical.S - Simplified
Simplified Chinese was developed in the People's Republic of China (mainland China) in the twentieth century in order to make the characters faster to write (especially as some characters had as many as a few dozen strokes) and also easier to memorize. Simplified Chinese is the standard in the People's Republic of China, Singapore and Malaysia.T - Traditional
Traditional Chinese refers to the Chinese characters preserved from the fifth century. Traditional Chinese is more complicated to write and memorise than simplified Chinese, but is still often used in calligraphy in mainland China. Traditional Chinese is the standard in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Although people in mainland China do not use traditional Chinese in writing, the educated population is able to read most of the traditional Chinese script.U - Unique
Written Chinese is unique in being the only major modern-day writing system not based on an alphabet or syllabary.V - Vernacular Chinese
Vernacular Chinese is a style or register of the written Chinese language essentially modelled after the spoken language and associated with Standard Mandarin. It is different to Classical Chinese which is more abstract and compact.W - Word
Many single-syllable Chinese characters can stand alone as individual words. However, more often than not, the characters form multi-syllabic compounds which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. Thus, a Chinese word can consist of more than one character, usually two, but there can be three or more.X - X-cultural Differences
Language is an integral part of culture. In both Chinese and English, there are a large number of expressions requiring decoding and encoding. When expressing oneself in a personal way, there is normally a translation problem. For cultural words, there will be a translation problem unless there is cultural overlap between the source and the target language and its readership.For example, "东施效颦", "名落孙山"、"叶公好龙" in Chinese, whereas in English there are expressions from Bible and Greek and Roman mythology such as 'Achilles'heel' (唯一致命弱点), 'meet one's waterloo' (一败涂地) 'Penelope's web' (永远完不成的工作) 'a Pandora's box'(潘多拉之盒, 灾难、麻烦、祸害的根源). None of these can be comprehended and translated literally.
Y - Yan Fu
Yan Fu's translation theory has been the most well-known one, which has been strictly followed by today's professional translators and scholars in China.He held that there are three key words to stick to in translation: fidelity, clarity and elegance (信，达，雅). Fidelity, difficult as it is, should always be the first and foremost rule. Once the translator has achieved fidelity and clarity he should pay attention to elegance. However, when we aim at the closest equivalence between the reader's responses of the ST and the TT, this theory is not perfect. If the style of the original is not elegant at all, there is no reason for the style of the translation to be elegant. That being said, Yan Fu's theory still remains one of the most popular rules for the Chinese translators, especially with translations of literary works.
Z - Zhen
This is the name of the author. It is pronounced "Jen" and written as "真". This character has several shades of meanings: real, sincere, true, etc. I hope that you have really enjoyed this article written with sincerity and learned some truth about the Chinese language as well as translation theory and process.Author: Tracey Xu, B.A, M.A,
NAATI accredited Chinese Translator
