Tasting of reading in English
I often read western novels, and of course it has already been translated into Chinese. I didn’t think there were a lot differences between English novels and Chinese novels. But during this winter holiday I read some novels in English and I found them very interesting. Why did not I find that before? As I did not want to spend a lot time in studying----- I always thought reading in English is a kind of studying ----- when I want to read some novels from England I would prefer to read the ones translated into Chinese. As we all know, translating can never be perfect, it would bring some mistakes and the translator’s own feelings. So when I read a novel in English, I found it was terrific and I could clearly know the difference between the two writing skills.
As to most of the English novels, they prefer to tell the result first. Even in some paragraphs that describe the scene, they would use the skill. This situation would never be met in reading Chinese novels. We Chinese like to make attractive plot: after the readers have been brought into the story the writer would say “If you want to know what will happen in the end read the next chapter please.”
When we read the novels in English, we would be tired of the scene describing. There is a great number of scene describing in English novels. They use this skill to make the readers know how the characters feel at the moment. They prefer to describe the situation using special grammar and combined words. It does not go with the language usage and it is difficult for translators to translate it into Chinese without losing the feelings which the writer wanted us to know. For example, in the book “Jane Eyre” there were a great many situations telling how Jane felt at time. It can be felt easily when we read the book in English but it was terrible when we read the Chinese edition. It was not only long but also can tell nothing to us about the character’s feeling. That was because of the different language customs. The translators can only translate the words and they cannot translate the special grammar and the combination of the sentences. For example, there is an English sentence “I hear the laughter, I taste the tear”. When we read the sentence we could have a strong feeling about what the writer wanted to tell us but none of us could translate it into Chinese without losing the feeling.
This time when I read novels in English I found it was not so terrible to read the long describing. The novels did not change but I did. And I find no matter how clear I knew the novels when I read it in Chinese the next time when I read English it will be a different feeling.
One language is different from another. The result of this is that we have so beautiful a world.
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