瞎子和跛子
tvan
May 16, 2010, 10:06 PM posted in General DiscussionHere's a fairly well-known morality tale called The Blind Man and the Cripple. It was written for overseas Chinese and purchased years-ago in San Francisco's Chinatown. I've retyped the original text and the original translation. My contribution is that the Chinese is in traditional characters with annotations for simplified characters. If you spot any typos, please leave a comment, and I'll fix it/them.
BTW this is written for third graders...
tvan
May 16, 2010, 10:28 PMBTW, here's the link. Borrowing a page from Zhenlijiang of Green Eggs and Ham fame, you need to select the English translation in order to view it.
tvan
May 16, 2010, 10:37 PM@bababardwan, thx. As you know, doing these translations is a great study exercise. A nice productive way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
orangina
May 17, 2010, 04:02 PM谢谢 tvan, great story! I will have to read that a few more times... It was a simple story, but there were some interesting word patterns there.
tvan
May 17, 2010, 06:32 PM@orangina, every time I read one of these children's stories, I wind up with some kind of problem. In this story, most of it is pretty simple. However, one sentence gave me trouble:
...很快的逃出大火熊熊的破廟，兩個人總算都撿回一條命。
in the first part, 熊 is used as an adjective. However, it seems to be describing the temple/廟 rather than the conflagration/大火.
As for the second part, my parsing is, 兩個人/two men, 總算/at long last, 撿/ collected, 回/return, 一條/one, 命/their life.
Two men at long last collected return one life.... Obviously, I'm missing something.
orangina
tvan, yes! these things are what I was talking about. But I haven't spent as much time with them so wasn't yet able to articulate what I found strange/difficult/new.
I think the adjective is not 熊熊，but 大火熊熊。So it is describing the temple, not the fire. The "fire engulfed temple" to be liberal about it.
For the second part, what do you think of "The two men got themselves together and returned to life." Not that they had died, but until they came up with their plan they were dead men. The piece of life they had left was forfeit.
tvan
@orangina, re: 熊熊 I think you're definitely right. I just don't understand the grammatical structure. I've got the common "older learner" problem of being too tied into my mother language's grammatical structure where the adverb generally precedes the adjective that it is modifying. I would have expected something along the lines of 熊熊的大火的...
I'm still working on the last part, though. The English translation, while it might convey the spirit of the story, doesn't seem to accurately reflect the meaning in Chinese; similar to another discussion going on in this group.
http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/8875#comment-177599
zhenlijiang
Hi guys I haven't yet had the time to really study this story, but would like to butt in just long enough to say I think this 总算 is "just barely managed to ~", not really "at long last". 捡回--same thing I guess Orangina's saying. The two were as good as dead, but they recovered what they'd lost = their lives. We have in Japanese this expression 命拾いをする inochi-biroi wo suru, which means being in danger of death (both lit. and fig.) but to then have a narrow escape, or "miss being killed by a hairsbreadth". 捡 and 拾 both mean picking up something that was dropped or lost, but looking in my dictionary this 捡 seems to really have the sense of acquiring something you didn't work for, that you're maybe not necessarily deserving of.
Was this tale originally written in Chinese?
tvan
zhenlijiang, thanks for the Japanese expression. I was relying on a dictionary-based parsing which, as you just demonstrated, suffers from a lack of context.
The book was published in Taiwan and has an 1980's copyright. Both the Chinese and the English translation that I included came from the book. According to the advertising copy it's a Chinese legend, but I don't really know.
This web site still carries the book. http://www.childbook.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=A135
tvan
@zhenlijiang, actually, I just got home from work to the actual book. Per the cover, the Chinese version was first published in 1988 in Taiwan, then ported over to the U.S. for overseas Chinese in 1991.
The U.S. version includes an English-language parental guide. I won't repeat it all, but its gist is "'The Blind Man and the Cripple' makes it easy for children to readily grasp the importance of cooperation." Also, that it helps children "understand the hardships of those who are handicapped." A bit heavy-handed for us adults, but I used to read this story to my children in both Chinese and English.
jen_not_jenny
FWIW，my (occasionally useless) hover-over feature also gives the phrase 撿回一條命 as "a narrow escape."
Tal
May 18, 2010, 02:44 AMGreat work tvan, thanks very much. I greatly admire your presentation, (except for the 繁体字 - lol,) I might just have to steal... err I mean use it for my own future efforts. ;)
tvan
So Tal, you don't like 繁體字？Well, as my grandmother always said (冷笑）, "简体字 for simple minds." ；-）
bababardwan
oh I love that group mate....love the soundtrack of 漂亮在粉红色..didn't know they were studying 中文 though...well if it's good enough for them,then it's good enough for me. Hope they pump out some new material in 中文。
zhenlijiang
嗨，你说的是《早饭俱乐部》吧！
Tal
Ha! You got me! You had a Chinese grandmother? 
bababardwan
jen not jenny has shown there are Chinese redheads [zenme shuo zai zhongwen?...hongse huozhe chengse?]
tvan
@tal, 哈哈，Yeah, and she was blonde and born in the famous Chinese town of Ghent!
@barbardwan, actually, it seems that I have heard brown-haired ( to my eyes) Chinese describe themselves as 红发. However, this is just one of my recollections from a conversation, nothing authoritative.
Tal
有红棕色头发的人 maybe. Ha ha, 漂亮在粉红色， I only just got that!
jen_not_jenny
I had to ask an infinitely more Chinese person than I for the answer...conversation went something like this:
我：How would you call my hair color in Chinese? not 红色？丹色？
她：褐色
我：我的头发不褐色的啊！
她：但看起来褐色
Finally, grudgingly, she let me call it 栗子色.
酒红色 was also a suggestion, which I overruled.
bababardwan
May 16, 2010, 10:27 PMHey thanks tvan,can't wait to read this one.I see it starts with our new/old friend 从前 so we're off to a nice start,hehe. It's great to see all these different presentation methods.Thanks for all the annotation...辛苦你了。The English is well hidden.I like your background into above ..who it was written for and the level it was aimed at.Well done mate. :)