中式英语之鉴 Chapter 1

我母静恒

Reading Task: Unnecessary Nouns and Verbs
Summary of the content:
        This chapter mainly focuses on unnecessary nouns and verbs.
        First, it talks about nouns. There are many redundant nouns in Chinglish writing which do not reduce meaning after deletion because their meanings have been implied by other words. This redundancy is due to the lack of accurate knowledge of the definition or register of words, such as the repetition caused by not realizing that HARVEST is used in the field of agriculture. There are also unnecessary words that are not easily recognizable, and these are very common even in official documents. The most common superfluous nouns are category nouns, which are used to introduce specific nouns, all it adds to the sentence is weight without substance.
        As for verbs, many verbs express complete and accurate meanings on their own, but we often use unnecessary verb plus noun and unnecessary verb plus unnecessary noun plus third word forms in our writing, which are essentially verbs shifting the responsibility to words like nouns and adjectives, and we need to be alert about this and replace such phrases with verbs. For example, instead of using “give guidance to”, we should use “guide”, which is clear and concise.
        It is worth noting that “unnecessary” words mentioned above are not redundant in all cases, first we have to determine whether it is unnecessary or not, and in specific contexts it may need this to mean something, we have to decide depending on the situation.

Evaluation:
1)Value: This author is very professional, pointing the redundancy of nouns and verbs in Chinglish precisely. The mistakes she points out are very representative, yet hardly noticeable to writers of Chinglish. This book will be of great benefit to English majors and will enable them to be more alert to these errors in their translation practice.
2)Style: The author uses interesting metaphors in her lines. She compares the superfluous words before getting to the point to clearing one's throat, which vividly illustrates that these words are as useless for adding meaning as a cough.

Reflection:
        Through the reading of this chapter, I saw the opportunities and challenges facing English majors. The opportunity is that machines can't tell when the same phrase makes sense and when it doesn't, and that's the difference between us and machines, which partly supports the idea that machine translation can't replace human translation. The challenge is that these superfluous words are easy to find in our writing, and we don't yet have the ability to recognize and correct these errors, so we still have a long way to go.