“同学们,你们知道怎麽用正确的英语翻译‘黄河三门峡水电站’吗?这里有两种翻译方式,比如,一种是音译(transliteration),另一种是意译( free translation or sense-for-sense translation):
首先他在黑板上先写下了‘黄河三门峡水电站’音译的译名,”The Yellow River Sanmenxia Hydropower Station or the Yellow River Sanmenxia Dam,“,他还说明汉译英中常见的音译包括人名,地名等专有名词,表示中国特有的,独一无二的事物,尤其是‘三门峡’地名之类的专有名词就可以采用音译的方式来处理 ;
接着他又写了意译的译名,or TheYellow River Three Gates Gorge Hydropower Station’ or有时也称为‘‘三门峡大坝’ ‘the Yellow River Three Gates Gorge Dam,“
To get some perspective on the Three Gorges Dam project, I travelled some 700km (450 miles) north to the Yellow River to see the Sanmenxia Dam bordering Henan and Shanxi provinces. It was built during the Mao era half-a-century ago. The contrast with the brash, tightly orchestrated, high-security visitor experience at the Three Gorges Dam was striking – and telling.
Historically, the Yellow River has left even deeper impressions on the Chinese national psyche than the Yangtze. Long celebrated (falsely) as the “cradle of Chinese civilization”, the Yellow River and its tributaries are largely responsible for bringing water to the North China Plain.
On these vast alluvial plains half of the country’s wheat and one-third of its maize is grown, and around it an estimated one trillion people have lived and died. But the Yellow River is also “China’s Sorrow”, prone to catastrophic flooding that has in the past killed millions at a stroke.
It was to the Yellow River that Mao first turned his attention after coming to power in 1949. Mao’s government launched an almost frantic campaign of dam-building in what was portrayed as a battle to conquer nature itself. The newspaper Renmin Ribao spoke of battling the Yellow River in the same way that legends told of struggles with river dragons: the engineering projects would “chop off the scales, claws and teeth of the wicked dragon”.