汉英翻译中的中式英语现象研究

A Tentative Study on Chinglish in Chinese-English Translation

王金辉

1. Please differentiate Chinglish and China English

China English is one variety of English, just like Singapore English, Hong Kong English and so on. In Chinese-English translation, we usually meet some expressions which have too many Chinese characteristics that differentiate us from the nations who write and think in letters. And these Chinese characteristics are established on the basis of culture, tradition, and philosophy, all such intangible human resources. So we cannot find the exact expression in English, then, we only create some expressions according to English grammar. These expressions are named China English. At first, it is difficult to be understood for some native speakers of English who are not familiar with Chinese politics, culture and tradition. But if we give these sorts of translation with some necessary explanations, it will be no more difficult. Chinglish are created by Chinese who are not good at English and they speak and write according to Chinese grammar, culture and tradition.

2. Please illustrate the causes of Chinglish with examples.

1) Differences between cultures

Owing to different customs and cultural backgrounds of the people speaking the two languages, the same concrete images used in the analogy may lead to different concepts and associations, or something meaningless.

e.g. (Meeting a guest from England at the airport) I’m afraid you must have had a tiring trip. (您辛苦了) it is proper to say “did you have a pleasant trip?”,”how was your trip?”

2) differences between thinking modes.

老子煎熬了小半辈子，还让老婆跟着受委屈

I have endured hardship for nearly half of my life, and my wife has suffered all along with me.

3) differences between linguistic structure

Lexical deficiency “东西”

Habitual usages “得失” loss and gain

4）comprehension factor

中国经济是个大问题。

The translation should be China’s economy is an important question instead of China’s economy is a big problem.

3. You mention in your thesis the initial step to eradicate Chinglish is to improve one’s bilingual competence. Please elaborate a little bit.

The concept of competence originally comes from Chomsky. It refers to the grammatical knowledge of the ideal language user and has nothing to do with the actual use of language concrete situations. This concept has been criticized for being too narrow. To expand the concept of competence, Hymes proposes communicative competence. In Hyme’s view, the learner acquires knowledge of sentences not only as grammatical but also appropriate. Learning language is learning to perform functions. In application of communicative competence, one should learn how in different situations the same sentence could perform the function of statement, command, request. As far as translation is concerned, this communicative competence is needed for both the source language and target language.