中式英语之鉴 1

扎扎。

Book Title
The translation of the book's title itself is quite interesting.
The original English title is: The Translator's Guide to Chinglish.
The Chinese translation is: A Guide to Chinglish.
It is not a direct translation. The title "A Guide to Chinglish" omits the word "translator," which aligns with the characteristic of Chinese to drop the subject when it's clear from the context. Additionally, the language is more concise. The word "之" (zhi) replaces "的" (de), and "鉴" (jian, meaning 'mirror' or 'reflection') is used instead of "guide".

Preface
It was while reading the preface that I realized "gilding the lily" is also a form of Chinglish! This was something I had never considered before. When I practice translation, sometimes I over-explain due to uncertainty. For example, the sentence "There have been good harvests in agriculture" initially seemed fine to me. But upon further reflection, it's probably related to direct translation. In the Chinese context, we are indeed accustomed to repetition, such as the Chinese version of the sentence, "农业获得丰收" (nongye huode fengshou), which literally translates to "agriculture has good harvests." According to English conventions, the word "agriculture" should be omitted.

There are six types of sentence structure issues: Noun Inflation, Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement, Placement of Phrases and Clauses, Dangling Modifiers, Parallel Structure, and Logical Conjunctions.

Noun Inflation reflects the Chinese preference for using abstract nouns like "问题" (wenti, meaning 'issue' or 'problem'), leading to a tendency to use abstract nouns in translation as well.

The remaining six types will be supplemented in the following study.
Table of Contents
From the table of contents, the book is divided into three parts: Unnecessary Parts, Sentence Structure, and Supplementary Examples.