This afternoon, I was typing up this post on what I learned from this translation practice when I saw XiaoQian’s post of being “不怕丢人” when learning English. This idea came up. I thought: I am not a fast Chinese typer, and I want to practice English writing and reading. Why not just write this up in English and read it? So here is the result:
In this session, I am going to talk about what I learned by comparing my translation with Hilary’s original writing. As I don’t want this recording to drag too long, I am just going to cover only the first sentence today.
First of all, throughout the passage, I used the present tense but should have used the past tense instead, as this is, after all, part of an autobiography. My translation is grammatically correct, but in term of the context, it isn’t appropriate to use the present tense.
Here is the first sentence in Chinese:
丈夫和妻子之间的这种对话应该与其他任何人都无关，这只是我们自己的事.
The conversation between my husband and I should be of no concern to others, but only to us.
In a better world, this sort of conversation between a husband and wife would be no one’s business but our own.
美坛奇葩 corrected me on the “I” used after between, as “I” is the object of “between”. That’s a very good point. I don’t know what I was thinking, but it just sounded right at that time.
“In a better world“ does not exist in the Chinese sentence. Whoever did the translation, I think it was a very good choice, better than, say, 在一个更好的状态下，在一个理想的世界里, etc. Instead，only应该 was used in the main sentence. So when I translate it back, the phase couldn’t be recovered. Without a direct translation of this phrase, we lost the frustration Hilary expressed with it, but I think it is a better Chinese sentence in general(in the sense that it doesn’t sound too much like a “translated” sentence).
“Not…but”pattern was used here in the original. I used the same pattern, but the original sentence is far simpler and more powerful.
If I revise my translation, I will say,
The conversation between my husband and me should be of no concern to anyone but us.
