Day 6
Thurs. Nov. 10
Discussion of “Ad” translations
Discussion of Eng-Ch translation (journalism)
Homework:
➤ Read excerpt from “The Phantom Tollbooth”
The Phantom Tollbooth is a classic English-language children’s book in which a boy named Milo gets a magic car that he drives through a tollbooth into a fantasy land where the Kingdom of Knowledge is in the midst of a civil war between the rival powers “Dictionopolis” (the city of words) and “Digitopolis” (the city of numbers). Like the 皮皮鲁 books, it is an allegory (the characters and situations directly represent things in the real world) and also a satire of the adult world.
For now, I would like you to read a couple brief excerpts from The Phantom Tollbooth and think of it primarily as an example of the genre of literary prose (also called “narrative prose”) in English. We will see that, like journalism or advertising, literary prose follows many predictable conventions. Before next class, please read pages 22-26 (in which Milo gets stuck in a swamp called “The Doldrums” inhabited by strange creatures called “the Lethargarians”) and pages 45-49 (in which Milo arrives at Dictionopolis and wanders through the Market of Words). Please come to next class ready to share some observations about the conventional language used in the genre of literary English. Here are a few things to pay attention to:
1) Dialogue: When characters are speaking, what kinds of words are used to introduce their speech? (Be ready to give a few examples.) Where do those words go in relation to the words being spoken by the characters?
2) Action: What kind of words are used to convey action? Can you make generalizations about these words or phrases? Be ready to give a few examples.
3) Description: What kinds of words are used to describe scenes (paint pictures in the reader’s mind)? Can you make any generalizations about these words or phrases? Be ready to give a few examples.
4) Register (formality vs. colloquialism): How formal or informal is the language? Where is it more formal and where is it more colloquial? How do you know it when the register shifts (i.e. become more formal or less formal?）
➤ edit a passage from the 女外卖骑手 article
Please pick a brief passage (~200 words long) from the 女外卖骑手 article and edit it: attempt to improve the translation. (Copy the passage into a separate Word document, then edit it using the track changes 修订模式 function on your word processor.)
In your editing, try to do the following things:
1) Tighten the language: make it more concise. Conciseness, i.e. using as few words as possible, is a key feature of the genre of journalism. In every sentence, try to eliminate any words you find unnecessary or phrase things in such a way that it uses fewer words.
2) Make the language more colloquial. Use shorter, simpler words if you see the opportunity to do so.
3) Research any keywords that strike you as having an exact meaning that needs to be gotten across precisely. (Don’t just look them up in the dictionary — see if you can find English-language websites describing the thing in question and see how they refer to it.)
Upload your passage to the folder “12-Edited passages from 女外卖骑手”.
➤ Make some edits to “A Mother’s Charge”
Pick three places in the Chinese translation of “A Mother’s Charge” that “feel translated” to you (places with 翻译腔). Copy those examples into a new Word document and then retranslate them in a way that feels more natural in Chinese. Upload your document to the folder “13-Edits to A Mother’s Charge” on SharePoint.
(Note that each of the three examples can be just a sentence or two, and they can be disconnected, they don’t have to all be in a single passage.)
➤ Read the translation of 《皮皮鲁外传》
Once it’s been posted on Sunday, please read this translation along with its Chinese original. As you read, please ask yourself these questions:
What genres are included in this text? (Hint: It’s not just literary prose; there are other genres of speech and writing embedded within the story.)
What aspects of this text do you think are most essential to convey effectively in the translation? Which aspects are least important? Be ready to share your answer and also your reasons.