【讨论】谁能够像钱钟书翻译到位？

文魁星

来看大不列颠对[汉语]的定义

Chinese languages

Encyclop?dia Britannica Article

　　Also called Sinitic languages , Chinese Han principal language group of eastern Asia, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese exists in a number of varieties that are popularly called dialects but that are usually classified as separate languages by scholars. More people speak a variety of Chinese as a native language than any other language in the world, and Modern Standard Chinese is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

　　The spoken varieties of Chinese are mutually unintelligible to their respective speakers. They differ from each other to about the same extent as the modern Romance languages. Most of the differences among them occur in pronunciation and vocabulary; there are few grammatical differences. These languages include Mandarin in the northern, central, and western parts of China; Wu; Northern and Southern Min; Gan (Kan); Hakka (Kejia); and Xiang; and Cantonese (Yue) in the southeastern part of the country.

　　All the Chinese languages share a common literary language (wenyan), written in characters and based on a common body of literature. This literary language has no single standard of pronunciation; a speaker of a language reads texts according to the rules of pronunciation of his own language. Before 1917 the wenyan was used for almost all writing; since that date it has become increasingly acceptable to write in the vernacular style (baihua) instead, and the old literary language is dying out in the daily life of modern China. (Its use continues in certain literary and scholarly circles.)

　　In the early 1900s a program for the unification of the national language, which is based on Mandarin, was launched; this resulted in Modern Standard Chinese. In 1956 a new system of romanization called Pinyin, based on the pronunciation of the characters in the Beijing dialect, was adopted as an educational instrument to help in the spread of the modern standard language. Modified in 1958, the system was formally prescribed (1979) for use in all diplomatic documents and foreign-language publications in English-speaking countries.

　　Some scholars divide the history of the Chinese languages into Proto-Sinitic (Proto-Chinese; until 500 BC), Archaic (Old) Chinese (8th to 3rd century BC), Ancient (Middle) Chinese (through AD 907), and Modern Chinese (from c. the 10th century to modern times). The Proto-Sinitic period is the period of the most ancient inscriptions and poetry; most loanwords in Chinese were borrowed after that period. The works of Confucius and Mencius mark the beginning of the Archaic Chinese period. Modern knowledge of the sounds of Chinese during the Ancient Chinese period is derived from a pronouncing dictionary of the language of the Ancient period published in AD 601 by the scholar Lu Fayan and also from the works of the scholar-official Sima Guang, published in the 11th century.

　　The sound system of Chinese is marked by its use of tones to indicate differences of meaning between words or syllables that are otherwise identical in sound (i.e., have the same consonants and vowels). Modern Standard Chinese has four tones, while the more archaic Cantonese language uses at least six tones, as did Ancient Chinese. Chinese words often have only one syllable, although modern Chinese makes greater use of compounds than did the earlier language. In Chinese compound words, few prefixes or infixes occur, but there are a great number of suffixes. Few words end in a consonant, except in such archaic dialects as Cantonese. A Chinese word is invariable in form (i.e., it has no inflectional markers or markers to indicate parts of speech) and, within the range allowed by its intrinsic meaning, can serve as any part of speech. Because there is no word inflection in the language, there is a fixed word order. Person and number are expressed in the pronoun rather than in the verb. Chinese has no definite article (i.e., no word meaning ‘the'), although the word meaning ‘one' and the demonstrative adjective are sometimes used as articles in the language today. Adjectives, which are probably of verbal origin, are not inflected for degree of comparison and may be used as adverbs without any change of form.

Linguistic characteristics

　　All modern Sinitic languages—i.e., the “Chinese dialects”—share a number of important typological features. They have a maximum syllabic structure of the type consonant–semivowel–vowel–semivowel–consonant. Some languages lack one set of semivowels, and, in some, gemination (doubling) or clustering of vowels occurs. The languages also employ a system of tones.

　　谁能够像钱钟书翻译到位？

文魁星

显然，古弦先生不熟悉汉字？

文魁星

牛头不搭马嘴！你不会翻译？就不要腰杆上挂死老鼠──冒充打猎的。

文魁星

刘老大应该能够胜任？

飞屿茗

这篇文章翻译基本意思还是简单的吧。至于像钱钟书，我想，汉语水平达不到，怎么比得过？