Pre-reading

芋圆

Before reading this book, I did some research on the Internet in order to better understand the content in it.
About the book
In the book The Translator's Guide to Chinglish, the author systematically examines the common errors in English written by Chinese. She classifies the errors into different categories and gives a large number of examples collected from the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and important official documents translated by Chinese, as well as articles from English newspapers and journals in China. The author analyses each example critically. And exercises are attached to each chapter, with proposed revisions. This is a valuable reference book for Chinese learners of English and translators working from Chinese into English.
--Amazon
About the author
The click-clack of an Underwood typewriter was a familiar sound to Joan Pinkham’s ears growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. in the 1940s. The daughter of Anne Terry White, who authored more than a dozen non-fiction books for young adults and translated several others from Russian to English in the 1950s and 1960s, Joan Pinkham learned to love languages at an early age. She studied French at university, earning a BA from Barnard College in 1950 and then an MA from Middlebury College two years later.
Although she had no formal academic training as a translator – translation programs being extremely rare in the 1950s, particularly in the United States – Joan honed her skills while working as a bilingual secretary at the United Nations after graduating from Middlebury. She studied the bilingual documents that inevitably landed on her desk, did some informal translation from time to time and also, on her own, read any relevant books she could find, putting all this into practice by translating Maupassant in her spare time and then comparing her translations with the published versions.
Over the course of the 1970s, Joan translated three other books, including Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme and Pierre Goldman’s Souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais né en France. But when her husband Lawrence, a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, was invited to teach journalism in Beijing during his sabbatical year in 1979, Joan’s career took a slightly different turn. From then until 1994, the Pinkhams spent a total of eight years in China, dividing their time between Beijing and Amherst. She continued to translate – her English versions of Henri Troyat’s Catherine la Grande, Alexandre 1er, Ivan le terrible, and Pierre le grand were all published by E. P. Dutton in the early 1980s – but she also revised drafts of English translations prepared by Chinese translators, working first with Foreign Languages Press, and then with the Central Translation Bureau. After returning to the United States, her experience editing these English translations led Joan to write her first book, The Translator’s Guide to Chinglish, with help from Jiang Guihua, the retired Chief of the English Section at Beijing’s Central Translation Bureau. Designed to help Chinese translators perfect their English, the book was published by China’s Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2000.