最近一个中国朋友问我：“热闹”英文怎么说？”
这可是个很简单的问题，但答案并没有那么简单。
本来我想是“noisy”但不能这样翻译因为“noisy”是贬义词，而“热闹”是褒义词。
我的美籍同事徐惟说应该是“lively”但我认为这样也不行因为“lively”这个词不一定包括“有声音”的意思。而且“lively”平时翻成“活泼”。“热闹”和“活泼”的确是两个概念。
我和徐惟都用《牛津精选英汉•汉英文词典》。按照它：
热闹：lively; bustling with noise and excitement lively：充满生气的；精力充沛的 活泼：lively; vivacious; vivid
好象最好的翻译就是“bustling with noise and excitement”，英文里面没有一个词可以用来表达“热闹”的意义。有时候很简单的单词真的没有好的翻译，词典也并不是很有用的。…
Derrick is still here in Hangzhou visiting/teaching. I missed out the first time Derrick cooked (and he even did it in my own home!), but I got to be here for his encore performance. I gotta say, it was good eatin’!
The vultures pictured above are: Wayne, Amber, me. The dishes were: ma po tofu, qingcai with mushrooms, cola chicken wings, and chicken with snow peas and red peppers. The chicken and snow peas dish was …
I did a poll activity with my students a while back. They were told to choose interesting yes/no questions or either/or questions, and then they polled each other in small groups. It got some interesting results. I did the same activity again with my summer class. Keep in mind these are Chinese kids 18-20 years old, and only 4 of the 25 students are male. (Due to the nature of the activity, results will not always have the full …
I think we’ve all had incidents of misheard song lyrics. You think you hear one thing in the song, but the actual lyrics are very different. I’ve had a bit of that in China.
My first main incident with this phenomenon in China was with the song “Nanren Ku ba bu shi Zui“ * (“Man, go ahead and cry, it’s no crime”). In the song, Andy Lau repeats “ku ba” over and over in Chinese, which basically …
Wayne, formerly of Goodbye, Laowai, Goodybe (and Hello, Laowai, Hello), is planning to relocate to Taipei soon. He has also redesigned his blog and given it a new name. It’s the latest addition to the Sinosplice Network (so some of you may need to update your bookmarks). I, for one, am very happy to now be able to read Wayne unhindered by the Great Stupid Firewall of China.…
It seems almost silly to bother to say that the photos at Ziboy.com are really good. I think most people that read this blog have seen them and know. If you haven’t taken a look before, go do it now.
The photographer, Wen Ling, has very little to say about himself on his site, however. Well, I got curious and decided to exercise my Chinese. I wrote to him and asked if I could interview him by e-mail. He …
Ziboy is a name well-known among those who frequent China blogs. It is the name of a frequently updated photoblog maintained by a twenty-something professional photographer in Beijing. I won’t say anything about the photography; the pieces speak for themselves. The photographer himself, though — Wen Ling — always seemed somewhat mysterious and inaccessible to me. I had questions. I wrote him an e-mail in Chinese and he was very friendly and open to the idea of an e-mail interview. …
I
It was the year 2000, and I had just arrived in China. I had very few Chinese friends at that point, but I was desperate to practice my horrible Chinese. I had ideas.
I sought out people that couldn’t speak English and couldn’t escape. My first such friends were the guards at the apartment where I lived for my first month. They just sat around in the guardhouse all day handing out newspapers, occasionally demanding toughly where cars thought …
I found this link via Zod at 905life. The article was quite interesting.
It was Li Zhensheng’s job in the late 1960′s to photograph the happy face of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution for a provincial Chinese daily newspaper. But as he dutifully fed the propaganda machine with uplifting images, he gradually understood that he was also recording history, and so he took a major risk: on his assignments, he began including disturbing aspects of the revolution and then hid
…
Brendan is wigging out*. Adam is pissed his bike was stolen again. Hank has recently fought off the almost overpowering urge to flee China due to a few particularly bad incidences in Huaibei. Brad has had his share of frustrations recently too.
And me? Well, I’m just great! Of course, I’ve had my unhappy moments here in China too — I’ve posted about them quite a few times. Lately, though, the only things I could find to complain about …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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