Bring, take and send Mandarin, it would seem, has one common word that it can use for all forms of 'despatch', moving something from one place to another. (I'm not sure about this. I merely extrapolate from this invariable glitch in the Chinese use of English. What would the word be, I wonder? 差, perhaps? The Chinese thus never seem to grasp the fairly elementary distinction between take and send - that with send, the actor makes arrangements or issues instructions for a person or thing to be moved, but does not accompany them or it himself; while with take, he does accompany the person or thing. This error most commonly manifests itself in sentences like... "The ambulance arrived and sent him to the hospital." Now, we might sometimes talk of a doctor sending someone to a hospital (e.g. in order to have further tests, after a consultation at the doctor's office); but at the scene of a road accident, the victims are usually incapacitated and have to be accompanied to hospital by ambulancemen or a doctor (or, sometimes, the police), and we invariably use the verb take in such cases. There's a similar blindness about the bring and take distinction: bring implies a motion towards the place or event the speaker is focusing on - hence I might ask you to bring a bottle of wine to a party at my house; but I'd advise you to take an umbrella with you if you're going out on a rainy day. Admittedly, this gets a little blurry sometimes: we might use either verb for things we need for going on a trip (because we may imagine we're already on the trip, thinking about what we've brought with us). But there are occasions where it is clearly inappropriate to use one of them: we always use bring when we arrive at a place; we always use take when describing going to somewhere other than where we are now; we always use bring when there is clearly a motion towards something ("I've brought you some flowers"), we always use take when there is a motion away ("Take the trash out"). The Chinese just never seem to get this. This (presumed) bleed-through from Mandarin seems to confuse all notions of 'despatch' - we often find people 'sending' newspapers, for example, rather than 'delivering' or 'carrying' them. Sigh. Teaching English in this country is a Sisyphean task. |
Friday, December 11, 2009
War on Chinglish (13)
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6 comments:
The language has numerous words and complements to express these distinct actions clearly. I often find the fault lies with poor instruction by Chinese teachers and in the materials themselves. This week I'm battling a Cambridge Press mistake that shows the same Chinese translation for both recipe and cookbook. Students have come to think of the two as being interchangeable.
As a Chinese in overseas, I admire Mainland Chinese is lucky ones to have a native English speaker as their teacher.
No one taught me the differences for send,take,bring,fetch,etc. when I was a student.
Chinese language uses a second character to indicate away(去) or toward(来) the speaker. No single character available to say "send" or "take" as in English.
For example, if I want to send my friend to airport in Chinese, I have to say explicitly to get someone to deliver my friend to airport.
I had made such silly mistakes during my long journey of learning English. I kept these mistakes in my blog to remind me and others from ESL about the common errors in English usage.
http://www.chineseenglish.com/category/common-errors/
Yes, DL, I think I've said in this series a number of times before that while you'd ordinarily expect errors of this kind to be the result of first language interference, in China it's very often just crap English teaching interference.
If this group of errors does arise from Chinese usage, I couldn't - with my crap Chinese - work out how that could be, what the inappropriately applied Chinese word or words would be. On the other hand, if it's just a dictionary error, it does seem particularly odd that such a broad range of English words could all have been mistranslated.
There may be a book to be written one day, a kind of archaeology of Chinglish, which uncovers the origins of all these linguistic idiosyncracies.
Anon, it's always interesting to get a Chinese perspective on this. It's often very helpful for learning some more Mandarin too.
The word in question is 送, which can both mean "cause to be sent" ('I sent him a bouquet when he was in hospital'), "gift" ('I sent, i.e., gave, him a pony because I heard he'd been feeling poorly'), "send off" ('I saw him off at the airport') and "accompany" ('I took him to the hospital'). In a sense it's one of many areas in which Chinese is really easier than English, and the distinction between the uses -- if you're not used to having to make it -- is really a pretty subtle one.
Ah, thank you, Weeble. I knew we could rely on you.
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