【大媽廣播】將“不怕丟人”進行到底---分享中譯英第一句話的收獲

 

This afternoon, I was typing up this post on what I learned from this translation practice when I saw XiaoQian’s post of being “不怕丟人” when learning English. This idea came up. I thought:  I am not a fast Chinese typer, and I want to practice English writing and reading. Why not just write this up in English and read it?  So here is the result:

In this session, I am going to talk about what I learned by comparing my translation with Hilary’s original writing. As I don’t want this recording to drag too long, I am just going to cover only the first sentence today.

First of all, throughout the passage, I used the present tense but should have used the past tense instead, as this is, after all, part of an autobiography.  My translation is grammatically correct, but in term of the context, it isn’t appropriate to use the present tense.

Here is the  first sentence in Chinese:

丈夫和妻子之間的這種對話應該與其他任何人都無關，這隻是我們自己的事.

The conversation between my husband and I should be of no concern to others, but only to us.

 In a better world, this sort of conversation between a husband and wife would be no one’s business but our own.

 

美壇奇葩 corrected me on the “I” used after between, as “I” is the object of “between”.  That’s a very good point.  I don’t know what I was thinking, but it just sounded right at that time.

“In a better world“ does not exist in the Chinese sentence. Whoever did the translation, I think it was a very good choice, better than, say, 在一個更好的狀態下，在一個理想的世界裏, etc. Instead，only應該 was used in the main sentence. So when I translate it back, the phase couldn’t be recovered. Without a direct translation of this phrase, we lost the frustration Hilary expressed  with it, but I think it is a better Chinese sentence in general(in the sense that it doesn’t sound too much like a “translated” sentence).

“Not…but”pattern was used here in the original. I used the same pattern, but the original sentence is far simpler and more powerful.

 If I revise my translation, I will say,

The conversation between my husband and me should be of no concern to anyone but us.