14 May 2022

Mr William Che, Lecturer of the School of Translation and Foreign Languages, delivered a public lecture entitled ‘Found in Translation: Common Mistakes in Chinese Usage’ on 14 May 2022.

The public lecture started with a brief introduction of common mistakes in Chinese usage. Mr Che pointed out three common mistakes related to translation: over-literal translation, Europeanised phrases, and Europeanised syntax. Over-literal translation is illogical and often involves overuse of some common structures. Europeanisation, a prevailing trend, is widely incurred in sentence structures through translation, causing imprecision or repetition in meaning.

Mr Che later cited several examples from the daily life to illustrate common mistakes in Chinese usage seen in Europeanised phrases and syntax. He thought that Chinese phrase structures are more limited than English ones, because nouns can only be pre-modified in Chinese, while nominals can both be pre-modified and post-modified in English. Relative clauses in English can often be seen to be translated into pre-modifiers in Chinese, sometimes resulting in unnaturalness in Chinese usage.

Towards the end of talk, Mr Che stressed that we should avoid over-correction in making judgement about mistakes in Chinese usage and should differentiate between ungrammatical and illogical structures.