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■「油漆未乾」的英文是"Wet Paint"。 資來圖片
Lydia Lui
Weeks ago, my sister asked me a translation question. She asked how I would put "jau4 cat1 mei6 gon1"（「油漆未乾」的粵語拼音）in English. What an interesting question! The four Chinese words would be transliterated(直譯)as "paint not dry", but what difference may it bring in translation?
A simple answer I assume many students would give is "The paint is not dry." This is indeed not a bad answer. It contains some knowledge about English. This group of students strategically link the unrelated words into a sentence to express one idea. They are aware of the requirement of a verb "is" and a punctuation "." (full-stop) in sentence making. The verb is correctly put after the subject "paint" and before the adjective "not dry". The verb is in singular form, which agrees with the subject. The full-stop is correctly put at the end to wrap the words up into a sentence. Not just these. These students are aware of the context of the sentence. The subject takes a definite article "the" to show that it is not any paint but that paint they are referring to that is not dry. The article "the" is correctly put before the subject and is capitalized as it is the first word of the sentence. Finally, every word is spelt correctly.
From "paint not dry" to "The paint is not dry.", the process requires the knowledge about spelling of words, concepts of articles, subjects, verbs, adjectives and punctuation, the relationship between these concepts and their functions in forming a sentence, the concepts of words and sentences, capitalization, agreement principle. Above all the technicalities, it calls for a judgement on which meaning is intended to be expressed.
Breaking the answer down into smaller units of knowledge items about the English language, we are now able to appreciate how much these students have achieved as shown in this fine production. Unfortunately, the assessments in our schools do not usually reward students according to the extent of their achievement. Our marking scheme is a scheme by deduction. Complete, correct answers gain full marks; incorrect answers, however, do not lose marks proportionally to how many knowledge items they have missed. Student A forgets the capitalization; student B forgets the agreement principle; student C forgets both. They may end up getting the same mark in a small marking scale. Sometimes, we rely on the mark so much that we simply assume a zero mark means zero knowledge and overlook what knowledge might have been displayed in the answers but not rewarded. Being an English teacher, I have to remind myself, from time to time, that students sometimes fail for their lack of knowledge. But there are other times that they are failed by the assessment system.
Going back to the translation question: how do we put "jau4 cat1 mei6 gon1"(油漆未乾)in English? I thought of "The paint is not dry." first. I hesitated and told my sister that I would settle on(選定)"Wet Paint". I had a vague impression that I saw something like this before. I was not sure. I judged that the four Chinese characters are in the form of notice, which expresses a quick and short message. I judged that notice in English should be straight-forward. Conciseness is a priority. A complete sentence is a fair choice in terms of clarity but a short phrase like "Wet Paint" can produce an even better effect─it gives just the minimum content words and thus a clear focus on the key information.
In this process of thinking, I realized that without the simple transliteration, I may not be able go further to the finer translation. Reflecting upon this experience, we may then see that the two answers may not be seen as "a good one and a bad one" but one leading to the other in the course of learning. The answers we are now not completely satisfied with could be a springboard（基礎）to giving a better answer that we do not yet know. ■lydialuieng@gmail.com
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