Tales Across The Sea

2 Responses to “Why are translations of Chinese so long in English?”

1. xgz Posted: Jan 28th, 2008 at 9:59 am

   1 Writing in Chinese is much more labor intensive than writing in English. If you compare writing vs typing (on an old typewriter), then the difference in effort is even bigger. Even today typing Chinese on a computer is still a laborious process. I prefer typing in English whenever possible, even on a Chinese blog as long as I expect people can understand me. Chinese had thousands of years to practice how to condense their words and sentences in writing. For example, in the first sentence of the book, the phrase “合久必分,分久必合” has eight characters, which directly translate into a nonsensical “unite long must divide, divide long must unit” (it is already longer than the Chinese version). No one spoke like that before. Of course now people do, because they can directly quote sanguo. Properly translated, it is two full english sentences.

2. Lara Posted: Feb 7th, 2008 at 6:04 pm

   2 Author Comment So perhaps it’s as if English writers were to communicate entirely in abbreviations (ibid., e.g., i.e., etc.). It looks as though connecting the dots and supplying the precise grammatical logic to Chinese classics is more of an art than a science – there’s a lot of context that the reader has to supply. Am I right in thinking that more modern, less formal writings, like newspaper articles, have more characters and more specificity?