英语畅谈中国文化 50 主题 第 44 章 When English Meets Chinese 当英语与汉语相遇A:The Beijing government is making an effort to rectify all incorrect English signs in public areas. For example, the sign at an airport emergency exit says, "No entry to peace time" when what it really means to say is simply, " No entry unless authorized". Other examples are, "To take notice of safe. The slippery are very crafty" instead of" Slippery road. Mind your steps. " Or on a restaurant menu "Corrugated iron beef" for " Beef fried on iron pan" , and " Government abuse chicken" for "Spicy chicken". B: In old Shanghai, people referred to such English expressions as "pidgin English", because "pidgin" was a mispronunciation of "business" in the Shanghai dialect. As English is becoming more and more popular, Chinese-styled expressions have become unavoidable. "People mountain, people sea," is a typical example of the mistranslated Chinese set phrase, "crowds of people". Some of these Chinese-styled expressions, such as "long time no see" or " Gung Ho" have been accepted into the English language. The latter is a reference to China's industrial cooperative movement. It has even acquired a new interpretation of being enthusiastic about something. A: Mistakes also exist in some translations from English into Chinese. For example, rather than following the established translation for Jesus Christ, someone used a set of totally different but phonetically close Chinese characters, and caused a lot of confusion. The same is true with the Chinese translation of "fuzzy logic". B: At its current rapid pace of development, China has created a lot of new expressions, many of which are almost impossible to translate. Not long ago, President Hu Jintao published eight points of moral advice for doing good and avoiding evil. The Beijing Review gave it a short title by translating it as "Eight Honors, Eight Disgraces". A:When English meets Chinese, it is like two strangers coming together. It takes timeto get to know each other. There are a lot of examples of how English is very appropriately translated into Chinese. The "beat generation" is one of them. It used to be translated to reflect the meaning only. The new translation is able to combine both meaning and pronunciation. According to a 2005 survey of the most commonly used words, Chinglish or Chinese English was ranked in fourth place. Chinglish reminds people of the expression "pidgin English" but it doesn't have any sarcastic implications. Rather, it refers to Chinese people who speak fluent English, which is likely to become the most commonly-spoken foreign language in China.
