I Jornada Internacional d’Ensenyament de Llengües per a Traductors.

GRELT (Departament de Traducció i d’Interpretació de la UAB). Novembre 2001.

Chinese measure words: a tool for subjectivation

How do we translate them?

Abstract

According to my experience as teacher of Chinese language, the mastering of Chinese measure words is a difficult point within the teaching and learning of Chinese grammar. What concerns us the most is the developing of the students’ ability to understand and accurately translate Chinese measure words into their mother tongue. Some authors claim that only Chinese has classifiers and that they cannot be translated into western languages. They also claim that measure words (i.e. those words which are not classifiers) do not present a problem when learning or translating. From our point of view, this is a too simplistic approach to the “problem”.

After analysing a large amount of material we feel that most textbooks and grammars for foreigners fail to give satisfactory explanations and teaching methods for the phenomenon of Chinese measure words. Although nor Spanish neither English are considered classifier languages, we often find words and syntactic structures that are given as equivalent in the translation of a measure word in Chinese. The fact that our grammars have not a special category called “classifiers” or “measure words” does not mean that we cannot compare them to Chinese in this respect and try to find equivalences.

Measure words can make a sentence vivid and descriptive and definitively enhance the effectiveness of the writing, but not every measure word in Chinese should or must be mechanically rendered into its dictionary equivalent in a foreign language. The translator should deal with them in a flexible way, trying to avoid a mechanical translation. To do so, the translator must be well prepared to face the challenges this linguistic phenomenon poses to him and must bear the responsibility of transferring successfully the intended meaning of the author from one language to the other.