Hello and welcome back to English for Academic Purposes.
In this lecture, we will look at the translation skill of Addition.
We first address the issue of meaning transfer in English-Chinese translation
and the role of addition within it.
We then focus on the adding of nouns as a way to improve the translation.
Translation is the transfer, primarily, of meaning and secondarily, of form.
English and Chinese are two languages which have common and different ways
of expressing the same idea.
English-Chinese translation is often hindered by the lack of formal consistency.
To solve this problem as well as maintain the meaning, the skill of addition is often used.
Addition, also called amplification,
means supplying necessary words in translation
in order to achieve the goals of consistency and accessibility.
Addition is always to supply what is implied but not explicitly expressed in the form,
so the meaning remains the same.
Let's look at an example.
A new kind of jet plane – small, cheap, pilotless – is attracting increasing attention.
The source sentence introduced a new type of jet plane with three attractive features.
These features fall into different domains, including size, price and piloting.
A word-for-word translation would be:
一种新型喷气式飞机正吸引更多人的注意—这种飞机不大，便宜，且无人驾驶。
This sentence was probably taken from a scientific article
and hence requires a certain degree of formality in the translation.
In the word-for-word version,
two of the features were mentioned by two-character adjectives "不大" and "便宜",
both of which are rather informal.
For the sake of formality and precision,
we can add "体积" in front of "不大", and "价格" in front of "便宜".
Notice that, we now have the three features of the jet plane
all translated into four-character Chinese equivalents,
which creates the style (雅) of parallelism (对偶) and orderliness (齐整) .
When translating from English to Chinese,
nouns are sometimes added for the sake of meaning,
and meanwhile to maintain the consistency of style.
As our case study has shown,
addition can secure the meaning, and also satisfy formality and neatness in expression.
This is the end of this lecture.
Thank you for watching and see you next time.