Expressing Percentage?

biancathiemer
 December 05, 2014, 11:58 AM posted in General Discussion

Hi everyone,

I just came across this sentence:

我希望你能以35%公布价的价格把三套样品出售给我.

Will the price be 35% off (i.e. pay 65%) or 35% of the original price (i.e. pay only 35%)? The latter version would be quite demanding given the context, wouldn't it...

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biancathiemer
 December 08, 2014, 07:06 AM

No ideas?

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bababardwan
 December 08, 2014, 08:33 AM

yeah, good question bianca, I'm not sure either. What I do know is that usually Chinese expresses things the opposite to what we would in the West in regard to discounts. So when they say 90% discount, they mean that it's now 90% of the original price whereas we would say 10% discount.

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Fiona@ChinesePod
 December 08, 2014, 09:17 AM

Hey Bianca,

It's a good question. I had to do a double take on this sentence. 

It is a little ambiguous because of low percentage but my bet would be on the latter explaination. 

The reason being is that 以 also means 用 (to use). So I think what they are asking is if they could get a sample at 35% of the RRP, not 35 percent off. 

But i'm not sure of the wider context of the conversation so I can't give you a definative answer. 

If they wanted 35% off they might have said "可以打六五折嗎“.

Hope that might have helped. If not, just give me a shout. 

Fi