Today, we are going to learn some words and their usage by going through the last two sentences in our first translation practice of Living History. As we have a relatively long episode today, I’ll go straight into the translation. Here is the Chinese version：
毕竟，自从开始竞选公职以来，比尔一直受到各种各样的指控，从走私毒品到和小石城的一个妓女 生下私生子，而我也曾被指控为窃贼和杀人犯。我觉得最终这个实习生的故事会成为小报历史上一条并不重要的新闻。
学英语3151：After all, even(ever?) since Bill started to run for public office, he bas been fabricated from being a drug dealer to having an illegitimate child with a prostitute from Little Rock, and I have been even sued for murder. In my opinion, the intern story will eventually faded away from history and become a story in a local newspaper.
My translation:Since his campaigning for public office, Bill has been charged on different accounts, from drug-dealing to having an illicit son with a prostitute from the city of little stone(haha, oxymoron: stone is big). I have been accused of stealing and murdering as well. Therefore, I thought, eventually, the story about this intern will become a trivia in the history of some local newspaper.
The original:After all, since he had started running for public office, Bill had been accused of everything from drug-running to fathering a child with a Little Rock prostitute, and I had been called a thief and a murderer. I expected that, ultimately, the intern story would be a footnote in tabloid history.
(1) The first word I want to talk about is “指控”, the original used “accuse” and “call”. The “sue” and “charge” used by 3151 and me are probably a little bit too strong, although later, in our second translation (passage, I mean), Hilary did use the noun “charge” in “there was no truth to the charges”. 3151 used “fabricate”, the verb I was looking for in our last episode. “Fabricate”, if used in the last sentence, would have been perfect, but here, was used incorrectly. As mentioned last time, the synonyms of “fabricate” are ‘manufacture, make up, create, etc’. If you put “create” in place of ‘fabricate’ in 3151’s sentence, it will become obvious why the sentence is not good, “he has been created from being a drug dealer to fathering a child”. So we know ‘fabricate’ here can only be used to refer to the creation of the scandal , not the person.
(2) The second word is the verb “father”. If you have been following the news lately, you would have seen this word all over the place, used for Schwarzenegger’s “love child”(if there is any love involved, giggle, giggle…). The word “Illicit” i-'li-sət in my translation seems to be more often used to refer to activities or things: as in “an illicit affair”, “an illicit copy of the software”. The “illegitimate” 3151 used, which 好学又好问also suggested, is the right one here as its first entry in the dictionary is: not recognized as lawful offspring specifically : born of parents not married to each other. “Father” in the original is simpler and better. Another example of simple words used to the best is the use of “run”, which appeared twice in the original sentence.
(3) a footnote in tabloid history: is a very good phrase, no comment from me, just memorize it! What I do want to mention is that 美坛奇葩 came up with this word “tabloid” ˈta-ˌblȯid（美坛奇葩，让我崇拜你一下下） in his comments, I can only say: 奇葩 IS奇葩， beef man IS beef man！
This concludes the last episode of our first translation practice. I have been slacking off lately on my reading, which I should really focus on. I don’t have a plan for the future of this 丢人广播，I guess we will just play it by ear. To use Oprah’s words: “I won’t say goodbye. I’ll just say ‘until we meet again.’
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选择“Disable on www.wenxuecity.com”
选择“don't run on pages on this domain”
