User Comments - TomMangione

Posted on: Fake Beggars?

The typo has been fixed!

Posted on: The New Intern

The answer to this one is a long one, and Vera has pretty much summed it up when it comes to the "correctness" of the translation. To translate the sentence "你在哪个公司实习?" as "Which company did you intern at?" isn't wrong, but it does assume something about the context. It assumes that we already know the speaker is talking about the past. The context could be something like this:

A: 以前我在中国实习。

B: 你在哪个公司实习？

In this case, it's clear that the second sentence should be translated in the past tense because the speaker is responding to something that took place in the past.

Strictly speaking, Chinese verbs don't have tenses at all. Tense in Chinese is always defined by context. But now comes the really tricky part. If there are no tenses in Chinese, what are words like "了", "着" and "过" doing? Grammatically, the answer is that these words denote aspect and not tense.

Aspect is a phenomenon in language that tells about the state of an action. In English one example of this can be found if you look at the difference between "I go" and "I am going". Both of these sentences take place in the present, but one tells us explicitly that the action is on-going ("I am going") while the other does not ("I go").

The reason we often translate sentences in Chinese that use "了" in the past tense is that it is implied through the use of aspect. Take a really simple example:

我吃了一个苹果。"I ate an apple."

What the words are telling us literally is something like this:

(I)(to eat)(recently completed)(one)(measure word)(apple).

We translate 我吃了一个苹果 as "I ate an apple" because we know the action has been completed NOT because anything in the sentence is explicitly telling us the action happened in the past. Because unless you have a time machine or some skewed perception of time, if an action has been completed, it's happened in the past!

I hope this helps to clarify rather than confuse!

Posted on: Hamsters, Snakes, and Owls

没事。是应该的。

Posted on: Sending a Large File

You're right! The "you" and the "I" were switched in the translation. It's been corrected. Thanks for letting us know!

Posted on: Hamsters, Snakes, and Owls

Thanks for pointing out the problem! The translation has been changed.

Posted on: The Brave Little Tailor (Part 1)

没错, bohan2007! The intro has been changed!

Posted on: Receiving a Package for a Friend

The "management" aspect of my translation 物业 was left out here to make the sentence sound more colloquial. Originally, I wanted to translate 物业 as "superintendent" or "super", but I realized I'd never heard that word used outside of New York City and that it could be potentially confusing.

I mean "building" here in the same way you might use the word "bank" in "Get the bank to cash the check." You could also say "Get the bank teller to cash the check", but it's not necessary (unless of course you're actually in a bank and talking about a specific person).

As for the choice to define 物业 in the annotations and vocab as "building management", that was to make it clear that the term refers to more than just a building.

I hope that this helps.

Posted on: Traveling on the Cheap

The dialogue has been updated to include a translation of 你跟我一起去吧。

I think that the alternate use of 马 for 蚂 in 蚂蜂 is a simplified version of the original. Regardless, both words are homophones, making little difference in spoken Chinese. Whether you want to think of hornets as "ant bees" or "horse bees" is really up to you!

I don't know if anyone has gotten stung at Mafengwo.com, but the site has certainly created a lot of buzz!

Posted on: 李开复炮轰做空机构Citron

guolan, here's how I'd translate it:

The attack of shorting positions against Chinese companies has already been happening for more than a year. Citron and others have announced publicly that they are devoting themselves to the financial affairs of these companies; however, those involved all deny it.

To break down the last part 而相关事主均予以否认

而 is like 'however'.

相关事主 means something like "those related and principally involved". I've just shortened it for clarity's sake.

均 is like 都 here.

予以 is like 给, introducing an indirect object (e.g. 我给他说话), but who they are speaking to is implied (it's 'the public', I guess).

否认 means "to deny".

Hope that helps!