Over the years, I have been pit by strange translation many times, other fields I do not know much, the field of social science is definitely the hardest hit area of translation, my social science reading history, a small part of the history of blood and tears fighting with strange translation... But I also want to thank them, it is their pits that make me make up my mind to learn English well...
Because those books that pit me are old and not at hand, I will give the "translator blacklist" summarized by many readers in China, many of which have many books, and they have also pit me - high-energy warning ahead, readers see it and go around!
In the past thirty years, there has been no one in the translation industry, and translation has become a professional technology, and "google body" and "golden mountain body" have appeared in an endless stream. What's more, a publishing house retranslated famous works, one by one, divided labor and cooperation, attached importance to efficiency, and considered benefits. In just four years, a translator has translated 23 books covering philosophy, political science, economics, literature, chicken soup for the soul, and other disciplines.
The shoddy of translation is evident. Crooked teeth, obscure, poor writing, unclear... This is how the famous works are wasted into garbage, and people are very hesitant when judging douban stars, not knowing whether to rate five stars to the author or one star to the translator.
Famous books are crumbled into garbage, which is more uncomfortable than reading a bad book
Those good books that are legendarily translated and play bad
1. The Road to Slavery (China Social Sciences Press, 1997)
Author: Hayek
Translator: Wang Mingyi
Douban score: 8.9
The problems with this translation are as follows:
First, there are too many translators, and the translation is taboo. Second, there are too many European sentences, and the writing is not fluent.
There are two major methodological schools of translation, one is literal translation, or hard translation, and the other is paraphrasing. Literal translation strives to be as close as possible to the original style and logic of the text, and pursues a "true" word; while paraphrasing pursues a "ya" word. Unfortunately, this translation is a typical failed translation that seeks the word "truth" but does not grasp the direction.
The so-called European sentence is the kind of Chinese sentence translated according to English logic, such sentences look all Chinese, but they cannot be read or read, resulting in the phenomenon of "three noes", which is a taboo in translation.
Many friends who are reading this book for the first time say that the reason why they can't read it is because of this. Hayek's original writing is logical and clear, the words are simple, the sentence form is not complicated, and the esoteric is his ideas, but the result becomes obscure and difficult to understand after translation, and it is only obscure at the text level, which blocks many readers out of the door. It's really frustrating. (From Douban)
Recommended translation: Yin Haiguang version It is best to retranslate
2. On Freedom (The Commercial Press) Translated by Xu Baoqi By John Mill
Douban score: 9.4
Murong Zhan: Books are good books, but I mean the English version. This flagship book on freedom is a classic in the fields of politics, thought, and law, and is one of the must-read books for the study of freedom, democracy, and constitutionalism.
However, Mr. Xu Baoqi's translation did not make sense at all, and I am curious if the translation in 1959 was not good, and the Chinese from 1960 to 1978 did not do serious things, then from 1992 to 2006, there were 14 years, why such a bad translation, the editors of the Commercial Press did not correct.
Recommended translation: Guangxi Normal University Meng Fanli edition
3. "Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism" (Qunyan Publishing House) Translator: Long Jing Author: [de] Weber
Wang Xiaoyu: The most cattle translator and the most cattle translator in history - the eighteen-year-old "Miss Long" has translated twenty-three books in four years, and the content is extensive.
Other works translated or compiled by Long Jing include:
Breathing the Heart (Democracy and Construction Press, 2003)
Let the Soul Hide from the Rain (Democracy and Construction Press, 2004)
Let the Feelings Run (Democracy and Construction Press, 2004)
Give God a Holiday (Democracy and Construction Press, 2004)
The Rockefeller Letter (Democracy and Construction Press, 2004)
The Little Prince: A Collector's Edition of Chinese and English Completely Contrasted Graphics (China Commercial Press, 2004)
Bacon on Life (Harbin Publishing House, 2004)
Emerson on Success (Harbin Publishing House, 2004)
Montaigne on Life (Harbin Publishing House, 2004)
Fire fox (Harbin Publishing House, 2004)
If You Give Me Three Days of Light (Democracy and Construction Press, 2004)
Big Management: The Study of Creating Great Companies (Harbin Publishing House, 2004)
The Law of West Point: 22 Military Rules from Success to Excellence (Democracy and Construction Press, 2004; Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2007)
Treat Life Well: N Personal Philosophies Of Following Happiness (Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2006)
Treating Fate Well: The Philosophy of N Successful N Individuals (Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2006)
Treat Life Well: The N Philosophy of Running a Happy N Life (Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2006)
Win: Rich People Don't Think Differently (Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2006)
What We Lack: Nietzsche's Philosophy of Life (Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2007)
God's Redemption (Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2007)
The Fingerprint of God (Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2007)
The Face of Chinese: The Third Eye Sees China (Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2007)
The Boy in the Striped Dress (Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2007)...
Recommended translation: Guangxi Normal University Edition Kangle / Jian Huimei Yan Kewen Edition
4. The Archaeology of Knowledge (Sanlian Bookstore, 2003) by Foucault Translator: Xie Qiang / Ma Yue
Heavy Light: The first sentence knocks me to the ground: so far, for decades, historians have paid more attention to the long period, as they have revealed from the uncertainties of political events and behind the interludes about them some solid and insurmountable equilibrium, irreversible processes, uninterrupted regulation, some phenomena that still show ups and downs after hundreds of years, cumulative evolution and slow saturation, and some great bases of stillness and silence that have been obscured by countless events because of the confusion of traditional narratives. (Douban)
It is not so much the fault of the translator as it is the fault of the publisher, and Sanlian actually chose this garbage translation.
Recommended translation: City-State (Machida) Publishing House, Wang Dewei (Taiwan)
5. "Spiritual Life" (Jiangsu Education Publishing House, 2006) Translator: Jiang Zhihui Author: [Mei] Hannah Arendt
Douban: 8.0
Yu Xiong: The English ability shown by the translator in the text does not meet the requirements of the fourth level of the university, and the quality of the translation of this book is also so poor that it is not too much to read, and it is not too much to call it academic garbage: large paragraphs of expressions of crooked teeth, all kinds of inexplicable translations;
This sentence translates in the opposite direction, and that sentence translates to Zhang Guan Li Dai; taking care of the front and forgetting the back, turning the back and missing the front; the translation of the same word is different, but the translation of different words is often confused; there is no translation in the original text, there is no original text in the translation, and all kinds of hard wounds appear endlessly.
I had sixteen or seventeen pages in total, fifty or sixty serious errors, and almost three or four pages per page. This is only a conclusive and recognizable hard wound, and does not include the obscure and blunt content of the general translation, nor does it include some debatable problems in the translation of words.
I estimate that adding up the problematic content would take up at least one-third of the book. In short, Mr. Jiang Zhihui is not translating Arendt, but raping Arendt, or at least mentally raping Arendt — and all his readers — with his clumsy translation. (Tianya. Idle Talk)
Mr. Jiang Zhihui's "Introduction to Hegel", "Spiritual Life", "On Freedom", "Symbols", "Creation Evolution", "History and Truth", "Phenomenology of Perception" books may all be listed here, refer to the "translator blacklist".
Recommended translation: Retranslation
6. "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (The Commercial Press, May 2004) Translator: Huang Yushi / Huang Yisi Author: [English] Edward Gibbon
Douban score: 9.2
Netizen beta 1.25: I suspect that the translators do not have a sense of Chinese language, often large paragraphs, XXX, XXX, XXX, XXX, XXX, has been continuous, people are quite irritable, especially to see the rise of Christianity that part, watching my whole person is going to collapse, basically looking at Chinese, thinking about the word order of English, I really can't stand it.
Netizen car: The original text is protracted and cumbersome (Alexander has to say "Philip's son", and so on, too many to mention). Translators lack a basic sense of Chinese language (such as the frequent use of "but" to connect two words with no twists in meaning), and there are countless basic errors, and the same person's name in the same chapter can be translated differently.
Recommended translation: Jilin Publishing Group Xi Daiyue translation
7. Economy and Society (The Commercial Press, 2004) Translator: Lin Rongyuan Author: [de] Max Weber
Douban score: 8.2
Sugar in the mouth: a lot of jargon translated by a person who does not understand the law
A Red Heart to Beijing: The translation of this book is comparable to the online translation of Kingsoft Ciba
Mountain Monk: I originally wanted to nibble on this book, but after reading more than a dozen pages, I still collapsed, I didn't understand German, so I found an English version to compare it, and I really wanted to tear up this broken book!! (Douban)
Recommended Translation: Shanghai People's Publishing House Yan Kewen Translation (2010)
8. "On the History of Liberty" (Yilin Publishing House, 2001) by John Acton Translator: Hu Chuansheng et al
Douban score: 8.1
Crow: After reading the English language, I found that some of John Acton's elegant and exquisite ideas about liberty were translated into a mess. The editor-in-chief, the translator, and the publisher really entered the "kingdom of freedom", so nonsense. (New Language Silk)
Recommended translation: None
9. Introduction to Legal Thinking (Law Publishing House, 2004)
Translator: Zheng Yongliu
Author: [de] Ngisch
Douban score: 8.5
SOFTAIR: I understand that you don't turn it over, and I'm confused when you turn it over. Excerpt from: "For example, I was impressed by the experience of a man whose wife accused the police of molesting their children and was acquitted. Because the wife later refused in court to repeat her previous statements about her husband. See page 58 of the original book (Douban)
10. The World of European Mythology (Triptych Books 2010) Translated by Yang Lixin / Fir by David Liming
Douban score: 5.9
Zi Wu Feng Hua Xue Yue: This translation is full of insane translation errors and proofreading errors. I didn't expect it to be so deranged, though. The Internet found the first few pages of the English version of the book shadow, compared with the translation, the result is not right, a pair of frightened, just the first paragraph of the "Introduction", a total of 8 simple sentences, the translator actually translated 5 wrong, and some are basic word meaning and grammar errors. (Douban)
It is reported that Triptych Bookstore has discovered the seriousness of the book's error and has decided to recall the book. The triptych's move is commendable.
11. "Sense of Reality: Concepts and Their Historical Research" (Yilin Publishing House, 2004) Author: Berlin Translator: Pan Rongrong / Lin Mao
Douban score: 8.6
Berlin's language has always been very clear, but there are not many translations of Berlin's books in China, and even Berlin's speeches on BBC radio are not well translated, let alone academic works. The book was very obscurely translated, picked up and put down.
Recommended translation: Berlin's books are suitable for reading original English books
12. The Freedom Trail (Xiyuan Press, 2004) by Russell Translator: Li Guoshan
Paramita: It is enough not to explain the version, the translation is bad, almost can be called "copycat version".
13. "Liberals and Communitarians" (Jilin People's Publishing House, 2007)
Author: [English] Steven Muwhar, Adam Swift
Translator: Sun Xiaochun
Xu Youyu: My example only includes the question that I just read this book for 20 minutes, the first 3 pages, less than 1500 words. Readers can judge whether the translator is qualified to translate the book at such a low level and whether the editor-in-chief and the publisher have fulfilled their minimum check responsibilities.
For me, this book is not easy to read, and I dare to assert that, in terms of paragraphs, the text in this translation that has no hard mistakes must be less than there are errors, and probably much less.
14. The sublime object of ideology
Translator: Ji Guangmao
Author: [Slovenia] Slavože Žižek
Douban score: 8.8
Malfunction:1, there are many cases of translators annotating the original text, but so many that they are unnecessary. A lot of very simple words also need to be annotated, which is a bit redundant.
2, often out of the printing error. I don't know if the translator is looking at the ocr-converted version, often with some ironic and imaginative typographical errors, such as printing é as a. (I don't know which language G should add ^ this accent), trompe d "oeil mistaken for ^ éil ( I don't know how they hit both accent marks on the head of e, I can't type it anyway), and so on.
3. I suspect that none of the translators nor editors know French. Some obviously very simple, unified translation notes, are messily stacked in the same sentence, obviously a very simple word "eyes", must be a note french and an english note, it looks funny.
15. Lectures on Modern History (Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2007) Translated by Zhu Aiqing Author: [English] Acton
Douban score: 6.6
SWX: Ockham, known for Occam's razor, translates to errors like Dekheim (p49), and we won't say anything about it. Then even if you make a new translation, you have to be consistent, right? The famous Prime Minister of French history, Colbert, was Colbert on page 189, and later became Colper (p. 197).
Of course, it's easy to see that it's the same person, but french star Turenner translates them all into Turenner in the back and Douyuni (p150) in the front, making it completely unthinkable that it will be the same person. What's worse is that even in the same passage, Lodovico can be translated first as Lodovik and then as Ludovico (p19).
Of course, the most amazing thing is to invent out of thin air an uninformed Pope Nicholas IX (p32) – in fact, Nicholas V.
16. The Complete Works of Plato (Volume I) (People's Publishing House, 2002)
Author: [Ancient Greece] Plato
Translator: Wang Xiaochao
Douban score: 8.4
zxh1964: I only read a few pages of the "Defence" and found that there was a sentence that translated the meaning backwards. Remembering that some time ago, the translation involved the word "idea", I wanted to see how Mr. Wang translated it, and found that he actually made this term disappear in the "National Chapter"
17. Capitalism and Freedom (The Commercial Press)
Translator: Zhang Ruiyu
Author: [U.S.] Milton Friedman
Madman: Because of the reason that I often read Zhang Wuchang's blog and the reputation of The Old World, after Elder Fu died, I went to the bookstore to buy the book "Capitalism and Freedom" and planned to read it carefully. Unfortunately, the book's poor Chinese translation made me take at least 5 minutes to read each page, stopping at a sentence and repeatedly combing through what a sentence meant, but after reading a chapter like this, I found that I didn't understand anything.
In addition to the above "translation blacklist", there is also a "translator blacklist" -
The legendary Blacklist of Translators
1. Jiang Zhihui
Jianghu title: Teacher Jiang Zhihui who is tireless and tireless in destroying books
Nickname: The Chinese translator who raped Arendt's ideas
Facts: A post by netizen "Yu Xiong", "Jiang Zhihui: The Chinese Translator Who Raped Arendt's Spiritual Life", was widely reprinted. The post lists 55 errors in Jiang's translation of Spiritual Life (Jiangsu Education Publishing House) and says it was only found in the first dozen pages. The post bluntly denounced Jiang Zhihui as "not translating Arendt, but raping Arendt."
In the summer of 2005, netizens concentrated their firepower, pointing out "multiple errors" in Jiang Zhihui's other translation of "Creation Evolution". One reader wrote: "When I opened this new translation, I was so surprised that I could hardly speak. There is no doubt that the new edition of The Evolution of Creation in Business has set a new record: the worst translation of the Theory of Creation Evolution in a hundred years... The difference in the standard of French among the translators is truly staggering, and the understanding of Bergson's philosophy is probably close to zero.
This translation is good without pages, good without paragraphs, almost no sentences. ...... The author has only checked three paragraphs, just two and a half pages, and the problems and errors found have been more than twenty or thirty, and there are no duplicate errors. Jiang's translation of "The Theory of Creation and Evolution" has a total of 306 pages, how many errors will there be? ...... How much academic value does such a translation have? ”
Not to mention them all, google them in detail.
Representative translations: "Introduction to Hegel", "Spiritual Life", "On Freedom", "Symbols", "Creation Evolution", "History and Truth", "Phenomenology of Perception"
2. Long Jing
Title: The most cattle translator in the world
Deeds: Translated 23 books in 4 years, spanning many fields of literature, history and philosophy
Masterpieces (translation or compilation):
Breathe The Mind (Democracy and Construction Press, 2003),
Let the Soul Hide from the Rain (Democracy and Construction Press, 2004),
Let the Feelings Run (Democracy and Construction Press, 2004),
Give God a Holiday (Democracy and Construction Press, 2004),
……
3. Lis
Title: One of the most cattle translators in history, together with Long Jing, he is known as the "Golden Boy and Jade Girl" in the translation industry.
Deeds: The Times Literary and Art Publishing House launched the "Nobel Prize in Literature Anthology", including 26 works in 12 languages, all deployed under the name of "Li Si and so on", and suspected of "Chinese translation", causing an uproar in the translation and publishing circles. Wang Xiaoyu also found that the scope of translations of "Li Si et al." is not limited to the field of literature, and its production scale is even larger than that of Long Jing, and has reached the level of "group management": "Life Strategy", "Kapa Biography", "Mythological Journey: Oracles and Fables of Recasting the Mind", "Records of Thoughts"... His translations of psychology have also been published in Taiwan.
Representative translations:
A total of 26 Nobel Prizes in Literature" (Times Literature and Art Publishing House, published in October 2006)
4. Song Ruifen
Titles and deeds: The most cattle translator who knows dozens of Chinese words, and was successfully selected for the 2009 Bad Translation Award
Representative translations:
Not only has he translated and published "One Hundred Years of Solitude" without the author's authorization, but also translated and published many foreign literary classics such as "The Unbearable Lightness of Life", "The Tale of Genji", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "Insects", "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", "Les Misérables", "Wuthering Heights" and many other foreign literary classics, including English, French, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Italian and many languages. How can a man of god, Song Ruifen, know so many foreign languages?
According to the Southern Metropolis Daily, Song was a translator who worked at a foreign language college at a famous university, fabricated by a bookseller.
5. Mao Kunlun vs Chang Kaishen Wang Qi, deputy director of the Department of History at Tsinghua University in Beijing, translated Chiang Kai-shek as "Chang Kaishen" in an academic monograph, becoming another academic joke made by China's famous universities. It is the same as the translation of Mencius as "Mencius".
——" Research on the Academic History of the Eastern Section of the Sino-Russian Boundary: The Problem of the Eastern Section of the Sino-Russian Boundary from the Perspective of Chinese, Russian, and Western Scholars" Wang Qi
"Mencius's maxim, 'There is only one sun under the whole world, and only one emperor above the people', can be applied to all the realms established by large empires." (page 99)
Link: At first glance, it seems that "Mencius" is a foreign master scholar who is very unfamiliar to the Chinese, but in fact, Mencius is the Chinese Mencius.
The so-called "maxim", that is, the Mencius Ten Thousand Chapters and Sentences: "Confucius Day: Heaven has no two days, and the people have no two kings." "Li Ji Zengzi Asked": "Confucius Day: Heaven has no two days, and earth has no two kings." "The quotations of Confucius quoted in Mencius and the Book of Rites should not be taken as Mencius's maxims.
——"Nation-State and Violence" Translator: Hu Zongze, Zhao Litao, Wang Mingming
Chang Kaishen's opponent came: Mao Kunlun.
Lu Xinghua, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tongji University, wrote in an article analyzing Schmitt: "Schmitt quoted the poems of the Chinese poet Kunlun to look forward to this real political struggle and peace under the world revolution or battle: take the fire of revolution and battle as a gift, one to Europa, one to the United States, and one to China itself, so that peace will dominate the world." At the end of the paragraph, it is noted: "This is my translation, and I have not found the original Kunlun poem." ”
The so-called Chinese poet Kunlun is actually Mao Zedong; the word is "Nian Nu Jiao Kunlun": "Ande leaned on the heavens to draw the sword, and cut Ru into three sections? One section of Europe, one cut of the United States, one cut of return to the East. ”
Note: This article originally contains the following links:
https://www.zhihu.com/question/20811195/answer/23818629?hb_wx_block=1
The content in the typographic source "Jingjia Reading" (ID: jingjiareading) does not represent the views and positions of the East Asian Review
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