Search results for 'tag:Genders tag:Translation' matching tags 'Genders' and 'Translation'

Re: Tombstone argument...

Philip — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:38:58 GMT

If your problem is with "she", you might look at a newer translation; there are several that are gender-neutral.

Mistakes made by Chinese Learners

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:30:26 GMT

Hi everyone

I just wondered if anyone could help - I have to write a profile of a chinese learner of English (completely made up). In it I must put any difficulties that the learner has in learning English as an L2. I have got so far:

Intonation transfer from L1 may cause them to be perceived as rude/inconsiderate, more serious transfer may affect comprehensiveness.
No inflections in L1 - tenses difficult to learn in L2 as L1 has no true tenses and concept of time is expressed by adverbs/implicit or contextual assumptions.
Difficulty distinguishing [r] & - Does anyone know why this is as I can't find a reason?!!
Prepositions such as 'on', 'in' & 'at' have one chinese translation in many contexts, 'zai' - may be confused resulting in phrases such as 'on Taiwan' instead of 'in Taiwan'.
Use of awkward gerunds e.g. 'no noising', excessive use of verbs ending in 'ing' e.g. 'do not climbing', confusion of 'ed' & 'ing' verbs e.g. 'i am bored' vs 'i am boring' --- all of these errors occur because verbs are not conjugated in chinese, for tense or pronoun.
No equivalent word for 'the' so may be used excessively when not needed e.g. 'The China' or missed out when needed. May also be confused with 'a'/'an'.
Confusion over countable and uncountable nouns, use of 'how much?' vs 'how many?' - leads to phrases such as 'I want a soup' & 'a lot of shoe'. This is due to there not being plurals in chinese - no inflections.

Switching between 'he' & 'she' - Does anyone know why this is?

If anyone can think of anymore it would be greatly appreciated or if anyone knows the answers to my questions about gender switching and distinguishing [r] & this would also help a lot!!

Thank you in advance.

Shannon

Re: translation of sentences French-English 8/11 (1)

Grammar Geek — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:48:13 GMT

Hi Hela,

My French, I'm sorry to say, is not good enough to verify the precision of the translations (though I was happy that I was able to understand the general meaning in all of them), so I'm going to comment only on the naturalness of the English.

4) Normally or Usually (either is okay), the police - use this, because it's gender-neutral do not carry firearms. Weapons is very broad - the "night stick" that many police carry is still a weapon of sorts.

6) You can use either arrested or have arrested. Police takes the plural verb though, so it's have arrested, not has arrested.

9) Now I'm going to look igorant, but is it closer to say "I would really like it if you would help me..."? There's no difference in repair / mend / fix in this context. You can use "can't manage" but say "can't manage it" or use the other version you suggest.

10) Again, I may be quite wrong, but is it "She left on her holiday/vacation a few weeks ago" rather than "She's been on holiday..."?

Re: Female is the weaker gender. Discuss.

Sara Straight & Tall — Sat, 26 May 2007 05:14:22 GMT

MrPedantic wrote:

Hello Sara,

I can't speak for US English; but the literal translation "people of colour" is now sometimes heard in the UK, as here:

http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/yasmin_alibhai_brown/article124936.ece

But it's the kind of term that drifts in and out of approval; I wouldn't use it myself.

As a general rule, it's much easier to say which terms are unacceptable at any given time, than which are acceptable.

MrP

I see a long long road of misunderstandings before my eyes....

Re: Female is the weaker gender. Discuss.

MrPedantic — Sat, 26 May 2007 02:52:11 GMT

Hello Sara,

I can't speak for US English; but the literal translation "people of colour" is now sometimes heard in the UK, as here:

http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/yasmin_alibhai_brown/article124936.ece

But it's the kind of term that drifts in and out of approval; I wouldn't use it myself.

As a general rule, it's much easier to say which terms are unacceptable at any given time, than which are acceptable.

MrP

Re: Grammatical gender

Kooyeen — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 17:03:13 GMT

Hi,
in Italian every word has a gender. I have to say that you recognize if a word is "a male" or "a female" looking at the last vowel. Umm, not 100% sure, though, on second thought there are some exceptions, but... well, I think practically no one here get the gender wrong, not even children. Examples:

All feminine: casa (house), bomba (bomb), persona (person), finestra (window), strada (road), giraffa (giraffe), acqua (water), auto (car), pizza (pizza), bocca (mouth)...

All masculine: computer (computer), qualcuno (somebody), nessuno (nobody), frigorifero (refrigerator), sale (salt), mare (sea), piede (foot), pomodoro (tomato)...

Yeah, it could seem strange, it doesn't seem strange to me because I'm used to that. English doen't have that distinction, that's ok, but sometimes it has given me trouble, for example in sentences like: "A person left a message. - What did he/she/they wrote?"
In Italian it doesn't matter if a person is male or female, if you say "person", which is a feminine name, then you have to treat it like a female. Translation: "A person has left a message - What she has written?"

Please help me check these two thesis abstracts on linguistics about Hakka

Nightstalker — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 03:36:53 GMT

My high school Chinese teacher asked me to help her translate these two abstracts from Chinese into English. I have finished, but I need to correct them into better English. Please help me. I have to give my teacher the translation. She helped me quite a lot while I encountered the most unfortunate fate in high school days, so I wish I could help her in return. Please help me check one of these two if you have time.

1. Abstract

This study aimed at the morphological comparison of Hai-Lu Hakka and Southern Min including speech sounds, morphology, grammar and culture. The following is the content of this study:

Chapter One Introduction: Presenting the research motive and research method, etc.

Chapter Two Literature Review: Revealing the importance of research in bi-dialects.

Chapter Three The Relationship of Hakka and Southern Min: This chapter presented the overview of historical background, geographical distribution and social contact of the Hakka and the Southern Min.

Chapter Four Phonological Comparison of Hakka and Southern Min: This chapter examined the rules of code-switching and the history of the phonological evolution of both dialects.

Chapter Five and Chapter Six were the morphological comparison of the classification, number of syllables, the composition and the word order regarding Hakka and Southern Min lexical words. It was the hope to find the unique feature words of Hakka and Southern Min as well as those that revealed the linkage of the two dialects.

Chapter Seven Syntax Comparisons: This chapter discussed the dynamic aspect of words as they turned into sentences, including discussions on aspectuality and sentence structure.

In addition, Chapter Eight probed further into lexical items in terms of culture, focusing on the classical words, words with âmaâ, the forbidden words and the borrowed words and the way they reflected the culture.

Chapter Nine Conclusion: this chapter presents the conclusion of this study and suggestion for future research.

This study looks forward to a more rising research attention regarding the languages of Taiwan enabling the development of Hakka and Southern Min to move from the state of co-existence to the common good in this new century.

Key words: Hai-Lu Hakka, the comparison of Hakka and Southern Min, bi-dialects, the languages of Taiwan, morphology

2. The Morphology of Hakka Gender Word âmaâ and the Cultural Interpretation

Abstract:

Language is the symbol of culture. When a dialect has a word that is rare or even unfound in others, this word is considered precious for it often reflects the unique culture of this dialect. Such a word was found in Hakka. It was the gender word âmaâ, which was unusual in other dialects but was habitually used in Hakka as a feature word. On the basis of the research of this study, âmaâ was used with at least eighty Hakka lexical words. This study examined the usage of the lexical words with âmaâ; first, the semantic relationship and morphology of the word âmaâ was discussed before probing into the cultural implication for its extensive use in Hakka. The goal was to uncover the various complicated semantic relationships. This study discovered that âmaâ had as many as 15 lexical combinations and at least 9 extended meanings. It should be noted that in some combinations âmaâ were considered affixes while in others they were only quasi-affixes. In addition to âmaâ, discussions of other gender words in Hakka such as âkungâ, âkuâ and âpoâ were also included in this study.

The conclusion of this study was that Hakka had a particularly rich gender affixes and it was highly likely to be the results of general personification or deification of the Hakka. Based on the word âmaâ, the unique characteristics of Hakka culture was also revealed to a certain degree.

Key words: Hakka lexical words, feature words, affixes, gender, ma

Note: âma(old lady or granny)â, âkung(elder man)â and âpo(old lady or old woman)â can be shown using the original character and transliteration such as "ma(å«²)". They are the gender affixes for words in Hakka or Southern Min such as âgingerâ, âThunder Godâ and ârocksâ, etc.

Re: pronouns

Philip — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 22:29:03 GMT

Masoome wrote:

hi

I have problem in translation of ~~he and she~~to my native language

because the gender is important to distinguish them but we have no differences between

both of them in my native language,Persian i mean.

thanks

Sounds to me as though you have no problem going from English to Persian. Persian to English, you need to be careful.

He, him, his are masculine singular

She, her, hers are feminine singular

No difference in English, either, for the plural: they, them, their(s)

pronouns

Masoome — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 22:20:35 GMT

I have problem in translation of ~~he and she~~to my native language

because the gender is important to distinguish them but we have no differences between

both of them in my native language,Persian i mean.

thanks

Re: Writing to more than one person

Timbo — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 21:17:12 GMT

This is the problem many face when when the gender mix is unknown.

In this instance, Dear Sirs,...etc would be perfectly acceptable.

However, if your correspondence is addressed to a group of individuals where you know a female is included, then you would write: Dear Sir / Madam (no plural).

Interestingly enough, in German they have overcome this exact problem by writing: Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,... the translation of the latter being 'Ladies and Gentlemen'.

I hope this helps