An intro to this group

michele

February 22, 2008, 03:00 PM posted in General Discussion

A few easy lessons from the ChinesPod archive translated into Italian

In my experience as an Italian ChinesePod listener and user, near to accomplish its second year, I’ve noticed, with particular pleasure indeed, those many cases in which my language offers an especially good translation from Chinese. The fact is that I was intrigued all the times I’ve found some expression, sentence or idiom that can be well translated adopting an almost “word by word” translation, and I’d like to share this particular feeling with someone else.

So, I’d like to propose my own personal translation of some lesson (or better, should I say, let’s begin for the moment from one of them, then we’ll see..) from the huge archive of ChinesPod lessons. Yes, I have to admit it, they’re not going to be “real translations” properly done from Chinese into Italian, because, of course, I do not ignore the English version, that in the very first aproach to the text works as a linguistic bridge, and, of course, helps me a lot.

But I don’t mean to apologize for this point, on the contrary I’ve noticed how profitable in my learning experience could be looking, reading and trying to understand the same text, written on the same sheet of paper, line by line, in two different languages, even though each of one of them known at different level. I’ve thought, this maybe could also be interesting for somebody else, for istance someone who already knows a little Italian and who is willing to improve it too. And, or, I’d also like to discover if are there, inside the ChinesePod community, any Italian, or Italian speaker, who could approve, or not, my translation, and eventually, would like to correct it, or to propose a better one; actually my intention is to encourage all those virual friends to show themselves in public, and do have a try to learn something together.

But, before starting anything, I’d like you know these following possible critical points: First of all I don’t know how much time I will be able to spend on it, and actually I’m primarily concerned about this. Furthermore, I have to say that my current Chinese level, according to the CP listening test, is floating somewhere between newbie and elementary, nevertheless, I feel quite at ease on the majority of elementary lessons, and occasionally, I’ve tried a couple of the lower intermediate too, even though, at the moment, they’re really too challenging for me, mostly for the large amount of unknown vocabs and characters. Last but not least, my English is so and so (I hope something like an intermediate), and I do love ChinesePod even because here I can get a chance to improve it. So, that’s why I’m going to do a huge amount of mistakes, for sure I know it, and you’ll find it, just from now on, in my English, in my Chinese-Italian translation, but, hopefully, not in my Italian!