User Comments - bababardwan
bababardwan
Posted on: Man or Woman?
June 21, 2011 at 12:28 AMI think in the first there is still a sense of daodi...possibly conferred by a combination of "so" and "or not". I agree "actually" would emphasise this further but don't think it's necessary to give a good idiomatic translation.
I think it could also be translated even closer to literal and be fine:
In the end, are you going or not?
or
When all is said and done, are you going or not?
I can quite clearly hear myself saying this naturally, but others would probably say it isn't what you hear all the time and protest. I just shrug my shoulders at that. I find a lot of stuff fine to say but perhaps I'm getting old and stuff is out of vogue and I never paid much attention in the first place as to what was "in" to say.
As for your other translations I agree yours are fine also, but I think you're steering a little closer to literal and the ones given are a bit closer to natural idiomatic. This is an old debate, but yes, if you go very idiomatic you do sometimes lose some of what was conveyed in the Chinese but at the same time it gives you something more natural in English. Daodi, I think it's up to us to understand what the literal is and what is actually being said in Chinese and the translation is there just as a guide to help us understand. Some things are very hard to translate well.
Posted on: Manly Men and Womanly Women
June 20, 2011 at 10:22 PMbtw kimiik, this may not be the case here because I've noticed previously that the number of google hits can vary from country to country, but when making a google enquiry to check on how common a Chinese term/expression is I always put them in inverted commas. Otherwise it will include times where the characters may be very separated and not part of that specific expression [and thus will be misleadingly high]. Interestingly it doesn't seem to make a huge difference in this particular case with 57,200,000 hits [interestingly this is the same number you get so maybe this previously observed regional variation previously noticed was an anomaly unless you're visiting down under at the moment] for them out of inverted commas and only a minor reduction down to 52,800,000 in inverted commas but sometimes it can make a very significant difference particularly with expressions that have more characters.
Posted on: Manly Men and Womanly Women
June 20, 2011 at 10:13 PMas you know there's also the character 小丫 in the 豌豆 comics. Just checked and “小丫” comes up 17,900,000 times and it's almost exclusively not about that character though.
Posted on: Ordering Fancy Coffee
June 20, 2011 at 11:13 AMhmm, just checked and there were 328,000 hits that came up under "无脂牛奶" except checking that out on google images the first 17 hits are of models [mostly on the catwalk] and it's the 18th that is a glass of milk:
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=%E2%80%9C%E6%97%A0%E8%84%82%E7%89%9B%E5%A5%B6%E2%80%9D&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=10216l10216l2l1l1l0l0l0l0l286l286l2-1l1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&biw=1280&bih=831&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi
Posted on: Ordering Fancy Coffee
June 20, 2011 at 11:08 AMI have been told 低脂牛奶 for low fat milk. So I'm not sure if no fat milk would be 无脂牛奶
Posted on: Manly Men and Womanly Women
June 20, 2011 at 7:29 AMhaha, very good. Reminds me of "You don't mess with the Zohan"
http://www.tiptoptens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/dont-mess-zohan-movie.jpg
...now how would you describe that character in Chinese?
Posted on: Broken Pipe
June 20, 2011 at 5:55 AMWoo yeah ! Got the wuye on the case (woo hoo de woo)
Posted on: Manly Men and Womanly Women
June 20, 2011 at 5:09 AMwhoa, hold the phone...the etymology of the very next character I looked up is interesting and pertinent to my above question:
妻...hand pulling a woman by the hair...meaning wife...what's going on here? reminds me of the old caveman days...clonk 'em on the head and drag 'em into your cave.
Posted on: Manly Men and Womanly Women
June 20, 2011 at 4:56 AMI was just looking up the etymology of this word 丈 as in 丈夫 and it's meant to represent a hand holding a ruler. Now, I think I'm making a wrong connection here because it reminded me of the old English [was it English?] law of the rule of thumb. So anyway, I realise that I'm probably throwing a western interpretation [actually I'm not interpreting it that way, ...it would be more accurate to say it just reminded me of the English example...I wonder if this is more meant to conjure up the idea of a handyman husband] on this and thus it's not a good example, but it did make me wonder about Political Correctness in China. Has it caught on? Will it catch on? But I remember when it came in here we were suddenly meant to say all sorts of things differently. I'm wondering about it's effect on the Chinese language? Would it even change the characters? That I seriously doubt...I think it would be more a matter of different expressions..different characters and words being used, but I'd be interested in comments on this.
Posted on: Manly Men and Womanly Women
June 21, 2011 at 12:39 AMah yes, now I'm trying to reconcile two thoughts here, because I am aware of that, but at the same time I didn't know that would affect the total number of hits. So I'm not clear exactly how what you're referring to works. There is predictive stuff, there can also be the order they're presented in, alternatives. Hmm, not sure. Anyhow, nice to know that kimiik and I are of one mind [at least for me, hehe]