"Chang Kaishen" joke: What kind of English should Chinese people learn?

Kai-shek (Chiang Kai-shek) translated it as "Chang Kaishen", but the proofreading and editing office of the Central Translation and Translation Publishing House failed to find and correct it. This low-level common sense error caused an uproar in public opinion. What is disappointing is that in the large number of discussions on this matter, most of them only echo the current cynical and cynical arguments, but there are only a few who are willing to carefully analyze the root causes of such translation jokes, let alone provide suggestions. Avoid making the same mistakes again. After "Mencius" and "Chang Kaishen", there is no guarantee that Sun will not appear next time. If you are willing to ask yourself, among well-educated Chinese people, there may be people who make such low-level mistakes as "Chang Kaishen" Will it be a minority? Or first ask yourself, do you know Chiang? A very important issue is that in order to improve the English level of the people, relevant teaching activities should not be limited to English classes. This should not even be limited to the subjects of literature, history and philosophy. If you have studied in foreign universities, you will know that many domestic top students in mathematics, physics and chemistry cannot even speak English about basic chemical elements, not to mention describing a physical phenomenon or chemical reaction in English when they arrive in English-speaking countries. The author has witnessed these things with his own eyes: a Chinese student who just went abroad to study science had to use an electronic dictionary to look up carbon when he saw a newspaper article discussing global warming. The reason is clear at a glance: from the nature class in elementary school to In middle school physics and chemistry classes, our textbooks do not include English comparisons of some basic nouns, the teachers do not teach them, and they are not tested in the exams. When students go to college, most textbooks still do not include English translations of important nouns (names of people, places, terms), leaving students who are interested in continuing to study original foreign works without a basic foundation. We might as well look back at the social science majors. For example, in the economics textbooks published in China, how many will mention John Maynard Keynes in parentheses next to Keynes, and how many will mention that the English name is Steven N. S. when talking about Zhang Wuchang. To magnify the problem a bit, our entire society does not take the problem of Chinese-English translation of important terms seriously. Walking on the streets and in public places, you will see road signs and signs everywhere that seem to be marked in both Chinese and English. But if you look carefully, you will find that most of them are not directly translated into pinyin. What's wrong is that it was mistranslated into very funny English. On the eve of last year's Olympic Games, the country worked hard to correct some problems in Beijing. Next year's Asian Games, Guangzhou is also preparing to make some corrections. But there are still a lot of uncomfortable translations. The author felt extremely embarrassed more than once when taking foreign friends to take the subway in Guangzhou: in English, cemetery is a rather serious word for cemetery, such as the London Highgate Cemetery where Marx is buried, but in Guangzhou, the "martyrs cemetery" is Martyr's. If you look at the joke of "Chang Kaishen" in the context of the education system, or even the entire social environment's attitude towards the contrast between Chinese and English nouns, it is not difficult to understand why ChiangKai-shek is mistakenly translated as " often Keshen". It is worth mentioning that although Wang Qi mistranslated Chiang Kai-shek, he still honestly placed the original English words for comparison. This was a very responsible approach, otherwise the outside world would not have been able to see the mistranslation so easily. You might as well think about it, among the large number of foreign language works published in China, how many are willing to indicate the English versions of important terms at the same time, and how many just muddle through? If they are translated incorrectly, how do we know? Growing up, how many texts have we read that do not provide Chinese and English translations of nouns? The reason why the "Chang Kaishen" joke came about is because our education has never paid attention to the comparison of Chinese and English, and we have never taken the translation of English-Chinese nouns seriously. In the final analysis, we have always despised teaching and learning. The question of whether English can be brought into line with international standards.

From this perspective, is there any fundamental difference between the English we use now and the pidgin English in the era of English versions of Mao’s quotations? What do we want, is English written and spoken to foreigners, or is it just a "night sailing" English for Chinese people to learn from each other in the English corner? Chen Yongjie, researcher at the Administrative Management Research Center of Sun Yat-sen University