Text C Translation Problems as Language Barriers

Pre-reading Activity

Language is a set of symbols used by a community to communicate meaning and share experience. Please translate the following items into Chinese or English and then compare your translations to the exact meanings conferred by the original expressions in either Chinese or English. Then discuss what problems you have in translating them.

After doing the above tasks, you are strongly recommended to prepare some idioms and get ready to share them with the class.

Some idioms are not what they seem to be. The following is an instance.

Text C Study

Read Text C through Page 120 to Page 124 to get the key points of this text. Below is the text audio for you to follow. 

Find out the answers to the following questions:

1. What is the title of Text C? How do you understand it?

2. Please write down the subtitles of Text C and make clear the structure in the text.

3. Read Text C, and underline the content that you think are important.

4. Use your dictionary to look up the meanings for these phrases: 1) vocabulary; 2) idiom; 3) grammatical and syntactical; 4) experiential; 5) conceptual.

5. Try to figure out the possible causes and give some examples for each of the five translation problems mentioned in this text. 

6. Try to find out one way to improve translation from the text and think about what other ways could also be quite effective.

Now, study the text via watching the following mini-lecture which aims to help you better understand what are these translation problems as language barriers in intercultural communication .

After Reading Check

Case 23 Study

Read Case 23, then try to summarize the case and analyze it from intercultural perspective.

                                Girl-ness

As a visiting professor in an American university, Chonghua Zhang was invited to give a lecture to a group of American students. He talked about university students in China. During the question-and-answer period after the lecture, one female student asked a question that surprised Chonghua Zhang. “When you talked about female students, you referred to them as girls. Why?”

“Because they are girls. That’s what they are called,” Chonghua Zhang tried to answer, but he knew he did not really understand the intent of the question. “I don’t quite understand your question, I’m afraid.”

“In the States, we call ourselves ‘women’ if we’re old enough to go to the university. Calling us ‘girls’ is insulting.”

More Reading 

可以喊女孩lady，但千万别喊woman，不然可能会出大麻烦

 在英语中对女性的称呼有很多，除了入门级别的 Miss，Mrs. 和 Ms.，最常用的就是 woman 和 lady。

那么，woman 和 lady 在日常使用中到底该怎么区分呢？

其实，两者的区别十分微妙，就像这句话说的：

woman 可以被称为 lady，lady 也可以被称为 woman，girl 可以被称作 lady，

但是同为女性，girl 却不能被称为 woman。

…对直男来说，也是很辛苦了。

乍一看 lady，总会让人想起具有某些特性又生活精致的女性。她品味时尚，举止得体，谈吐优雅。

如果 lady 的首字母大写，那经常来指称某些地位显要的人，可能她的丈夫是某位贵族或者男爵。

Lady 的头衔通常是根据社交圈判定或者是女王授予的荣誉。

比如铁娘子撒切尔夫人，她曾经是男爵夫人（丈夫是男爵），后来被称为夫人，以示对她作为一位女首相的认可；这份荣誉使她能够坐在上议院里。

lady 拥有良好的出身，在过去通常是贵族阶级的人。

但现在，lady 的称呼某种程度上也超越了阶级的限定，因为 cleaner（清洁工）常被称为 cleaning lady。

lady 或者 woman 的称呼可以用来描述不同职业里的女性，成为性别政治的一部分；在很多情况下，两者的区分不大。

不过有些行业里更喜欢用 lady 来形容，比如Lady President、lady doctor 听起来比 woman president、woman doctor 更好。

lady 的使用常用来表示一种礼貌和尊敬，比如很多讲话的开始都是 ladies and gentlemen。

前美国小姐 Kirsten Dalton Wolfe 曾说：

Being female is a matter of birth,

Being a woman is a matter of age,

And being a lady is a matter of choice. 

所以总结下来，woman 和 lady 之间的使用区别取决于你如何选择。某种程度上，可以参考为什么女生不愿意被称为妇女，但愿意被称为女士。

 

Now you've finished studying Text C, have you mastered the key points in the text? If the answer is YES, you may move on to the last part of this chapter to sum up what you've learned in this chapter.