口译课件三Figures and Times.ppt

Interpreting of Figures and Times a Some Practical Difficulties for Chinese Interpreters For an interpreter, to do a long series of figures in interpretation is always by no means easy. And for an interpreter whose mother tongue is Chinese, the difficulties involved seem to be even greater. Notably among the difficulties are the following: In Chinese, one tends to say “万” and “亿” of which there is no equivalent in English. Hence “一万” must be rendered into “10千” (ten thousand); “三万” into “30千” (thirty thousand); “二十万” into “200千” (two hundred thousand), etc.. And “一亿” must be rendered into “100百万” (one hundred million); “一亿三十万” into “100百万零300千” (one hundred million and three hundred thousand); “十亿” into “1,000百万” (one thousand million, or one billion in American usage); and “一百亿”, “10千百万” (i.e. ten thousand million or 10 billion in American English), etc.. All this may cause complication for a beginner or for those young interpreters who have not undergone sufficient training in this regard. The ways comparison is expressed in Chinese are, in some respects, different from those in English, especially when the questions of countable and uncountable nouns are involved, e.g. (1) Though in Chinese we say “倍” when we talk about “学校为……的三倍” in describing the increase in the number of schools, in English we shall have to say, for instance, “There are three times as many middle schools now in our province as there were in the early post-liberation days.” (2) Though in Chinese we use the same word “倍” when we talk about “粮食产量”, in English we shall have to say, for example, “Our province produces twice as much grain as it did on the eve of liberation in 1949.” 3) Quite a few units of measurement in Chinese —— such as li (1/2 kilometers), mu (0.66 hectare, or 1/6 acre), jin (1/2kilogram), etc. —— usually have to be converted into the metric systems by the interpreter on formal occasions, so as to facilitate understanding. And this extra bit of work (concerning c