Chapter2-5

Tony带水

Reader: 英语2302班阳佳玲
Reading Time: 3.24-3.30
Reading Task: Chapter2-Chapter5
Translation Task: Twenty exercises

Summary of the Content: These chapters focus on unnecessary modifiers and redundant repetition, including: redundant modifiers such as "mutual cooperation" implied bidirectional cooperation itself; Intensifiers and determiners such as "extremely important" can be replaced with the more accurate "essential" or "vital"; In Chinese, repetition is often used to disambiguate or reinforce semantics, whereas in English repetition should be avoided (unless rhetorical need arises).

Evaluation: The author uses a large number of example sentences of political texts to contrast the redundant and concise expression, intuitively show the problem, and explain it easily. The "minimalist style" advocated in the book conflicts with some English writing guidelines, such as "conduct an analysis" rather than "analyze" in academic papers, which should be flexibly used in combination with the text type.

Reflection: If the target audience is a native English speaker, we should imitate their language habits and avoid Chinese structures. We need to cultivate the vigilance of redundant expression by comparing the thinking differences between Chinese and English. In general, these chapters focus on "eliminating redundancy" and provide translators with tools to identify and correct Chinglish, but their methods need to be flexibly applied according to the specific context. For translation learners, the core revelation is that language transformation is not only a lexical replacement, but also a switching of thinking patterns—from Chinese "parataxis" to English "hypotaxis", from redundant embellishment to precise expression.
Before reading this chapter, my translation often fell into the misunderstanding of "literal fidelity" and pursued the one-to-one correspondence between Chinese and English words, resulting in a lengthy and stiff translation. The book's dissection of "redundant nouns" made me realize that many Chinglish problems stem from the "implicit reliance" on Chinese structures. In the past, I thought that "faithfulness" meant following the same path, but now I realize that translators should take the initiative to judge the logical differences between Chinese and English and boldly reconstruct sentence structure. In the post-translation review, I will specifically check the high-frequency redundant words such as "problem, work, aspect, situation" and force myself to think whether they can be deleted or replaced with verbs.