Hello everyone, my name is Miguel and I teach interpreting and
translation at the University of Bath here in the U.K.
and I also teach Chinese to English translation from time to
time. And I do contribute also to a course we have on editing
and proofreading. So today I would like to give you a little
taster of what you might be learning on the MA in translation
with business interpreting, more specifically in the editing and
proofreading unit that we have in the first semester of this
program. So I'm going to share my screen with you and I'm going
to share with you a text translation, rather, of a speech made
by President Xi Jinping in 2015.
So it's a slightly old text, but it's still linguistically
relevant because what I'd like to do today with you is to go
through the translation of the Chinese and see where we could
make the English sound a little bit more idiomatic.
So if we go to the first paragraph here, we've got time flies,
Year 2014 is coming to an end.
Now, the first thing we need to make sure in an English
translation is to make sure that we've got the articles, the
tense and the grammar correct.
So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add a the
here, because year 2014 needs an article.
We're talking about a specific year, so we need that the there.
So the year 2014 is coming to an end.
The next thing I've highlighted is this expression here, so in
this turn of the year.
Now that gets across the meaning in English, but it doesn't sound
particularly natural in English.
So if you go to political speeches made by British politicians,
or Australian or American politicians, they normally wouldn't
say this. They would say as we usher in the new year.
So I might change that to as we usher in the new year, that
sounds much more natural in English.
So then he goes on to say, I now extend my best wishes to people
of all ethnic groups in China and other parts of China and the
world. Now, at the very end, he says, as well as to friends in
other countries and regions in the world.
Fine, grammatically it's correct.
But again, if you want to add a bit of rhythm, a bit of flow to
the English text, it might sound better to say across the world.
And not only have we added a bit of rhythm there we're also
emphasising that wherever you are in the world, President Xi
Jinping sends, sends you his best wishes.
So that provides a bit of emphasis as well as a bit of rhythm.
Now, if we move to the next paragraph, as I said, we need to
make sure that the tense is correct.
So here you've got a sentence which says 2014 is an unforgettable
year. Should be was an unforgettable year because it's in the
past tense. This is something that's already finished.
It's over, now we're in 2015 and therefore we need the past
tense there. Now, here we move on to territory, which is a bit
more about Chinglish and repetition and flow.
So in the Chinese you've got Tuījìn gǎigé and then later on
you've got Jījí tuījìn jīngjì shèhuì fāzhǎn.
Now in English, they've translated it as pushed forward reforms
and then later on pushed forward economic and social
development. Well, that's not wrong.
It would, first of all, sound better to change it to a different
expression in English to make it sound more natural.
And secondly, in order to avoid repetition, you might want to
use two different turns of phrase here and here.
So, again, if you look at speeches made by British politicians,
for example, you very rarely hear them say we pushed forward
reforms. They usually say we pushed through reforms, so that
would be effective preposition to use in that context, we pushed
forward reforms with strong commitment.
We overcame many hardships, again, that's another expression
that comes across as a little bit, Chinglish, the word hardship.
We don't use it a lot in English.
It may sound better to say we overcame numerous difficulties or
something like that. Now, this next sentence here, many of which
are closely associated with the interests of the general public,
is this Qízhōng xǔduō yǔ gōngzhòng lìyì xīxīxiāngguān.
So this sentence in Chinese does sound a little bit stilted in
English. It's a close translation of the Chinese, but it doesn't
sound very natural.
So, again, if you go to a speech made by David Cameron or
Theresa May or subsequent prime ministers, you will often see
that they use expressions like close to the hearts of the
British people or speak to the concerns of the British people or
even these are issues that matter to the British people.
So we might change it to something like that.
You also need to remember that measures aren't really anything
to do with the people or the people can't really relate to
measures, so we would have to change the sentence a little bit
and say introduced a series of important reform measures which
speak to the concerns of the British public.
Sorry, the Chinese public in this case. That would sound much
more natural in English and also its made the text shorter,
which is always good. We worked to adapt to the new normal of
economic growth, often in English, you will see the expression
we worked towards adapting.
So we need to change that to an ing-verb pair or add an ing on
the end. Now we come back to this next pushed forward, in order
to avoid saying pushed through again, maybe we can change the
verb to something else and I would probably use drive.
But in order to link the two sentences together better, again we
could use an ing ending on the verb.
So let's see if that sentence reads well now, we worked towards
adapting to the new normal of economic growth, driving economic
and social development, resulting in further improvement in
people's lives. To me, that sounds much more natural in English.
But I think maybe we can change this lives to livelihoods.
And that will make it even better, so we work towards adapting
to the new normal of economic growth, driving economic and
social development, resulting in further improvement in people's
livelihoods. That sounds to me like a much more natural English
text. Now, there are many more things we could do to this text
to make it sound more natural or more idiomatic.
That's all I have time to talk to you about today.
But I hope this has given you an idea of some of the things that
we might talk about in a proofreading and editing class to make
our target text, or our text in English, a little bit more
natural sounding in English.
The reason why I wanted to talk to you about editing and
proofreading on our programs is because a lot of our graduates
end up working for companies in mainland China, in Hong Kong,
Taiwan and other parts of the world.
And even though sometimes their job description is translator or
interpreter at a particular company, we found that a lot of our
graduates have to work on proofreading and editing for a large
percentage of the time.
Which means that they have to make sure that the different texts
that have been translated are ready to be published on a website
or on a newsletter, etc, or even writing letters to shareholders
for their companies, so editing and proofreading is going to be
a very important skill in these jobs for our graduates.
The second thing that's important to remember is that with the
advances of technology that we're seeing, for example, in the
field of artificial intelligence, certain types of translation
can be done by machines now, but you still need a human being to
do the final proof or the final edit to make sure that
everything is correct. And so this sort of skill will continue
to be very relevant in the future, even with the development of
artificial intelligence or softwares to help us translate in our
work. So I hope this has been useful and I hope that it's
provided a bit of food for thought in terms of the things that
you have to look out for when you're editing and proofreading.
And hopefully this will be a very relevant skill for all of you
in the future. Thank you.