Passage 1:
French are elegant people.(此话非常概括，是“帅才”，所以会统领一只队伍) They are artists in everyday life, having a very good taste in everything. They don’t like American tourists wearing jeans to go into their luxurious and exquisite five-star restaurants, so one of the restaurants put a notice outside its front door. It read ‘No trousers, please!’(读完了，感觉是个很具体的例子，对吗？)
A gourmet coffee was sold in Tokyo as an antidote to stress. Its name supposedly meant to people that it would soothe the troubled breast, yet when it was printed in English, it turned out to be ‘Ease Your Bosoms.’(又是一个例子，我们开始揣摩：作者要说什么呢？)
Swedes started a promotion stunt to promote the sales of their vacuum cleaner named Electro. Their original ad slogan was translated as ‘Nothing sucks like Electro.’(又一个例子！意图何在？)
The selling of Chevrolet was very bad in South America. And the reason? The translation of this brand sounds like ‘no va’—which means ‘It doesn’t go’ in Spanish.(还是例子！！为什么呀？)
When Pepsi-cola invaded the huge Chinese and German markets, the efforts initially fizzled. The product’s slogan, ‘Come alive with the Pepsi generation’, was rendered into German as ‘come out of the grave with Pepsi’. Coca-Cola also discovered something had gone wrong in Taiwan. The Chinese characters chosen for the world-famous product sound like its name means ‘Bite the Wax Tadpole.’(依然是例子！！！肯定要说明某个道理，那这个道理是什么呢？)
A pliers company’s slogan ‘Turn it loose’ became, in Spanish, equivalent to ‘suffer from diarrhea.’ A company translated its sticky tape slogan into Japanese and came up with a sticky problem. The slogan ‘Sticks like crazy’ became literally ‘it sticks foolishly’ in Japanese.(更多的例子！如果没有目的，那是不可能的！)
A tonic product in China is made of royal jelly and is supposed to be very effective for some chronic diseases. Yet it was translated as ‘oral liquid’, which means ‘saliva’ in English. In the brochure, it was described in this way: ‘it tastes like medicine’, when the language in the original meant to use it as a food therapy.(例子！！)
Even the wrong nonverbal cue can bring havoc to a product.(此话也是“帅才”) A baby food company initially packaged their African products just the same as in the US—with a cute baby picture on the jar. They didn’t realize that because so many Africans cannot read, nearly all packaged products sold in Africa carry pictures of what is inside. Pureed baby! How horrible!(例子越举越厉害了，看来是要举到头了！)
In an Asian city, where traffic is really very bad, to secure people’s safety, the municipal government has built underground passageways. Pedestrians are asked to use them whenever they need to cross the main street. A sign was posted once on the roadside, pointing to the entrance to an underground passageway, intending to notify English-speaking passengers, ‘Go Underground’.(眼睛的余光已经看到全篇的结束了，所以，这肯定是最后一个例子啦！同时，马上也就要看到作者想说明什么问题啦！)
We chuckled at such clumsy translations.(比较概括，“帅才”，那为什么忍不住要笑呢？下面的解释就必然是作者的写作意图了)Is there anything wrong in the language? We must be aware that few words and idioms can be literally translated. It’s best to hire the best for translation. Don’t take it for granted that as long as one speaks a little English, he is autonomously able to do the translation. It takes a while to learn to be a good translator.(就是它！千呼万唤使出来！) |
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