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How Do You Solve a Problem Like Verb to Be? A Parallel Translational Comparison Dealing with the Vocabulary Incompatibility (93684)
Session Chair: Xavier Lin
Wednesday, 5 November 2025 15:00
Session: Session 2
Room: Room A (4F)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
Dealing with incompatibility forms the main, if not the sole, task in translation. Of what and how one language expresses, there are never perfectly compatible counterparts in another language. Even when the incompatibility is ostensibly made translatable with different types of shifts and swaps, what inevitably suffers is the lost of the stylistic and/or aesthetic coherence of the whole translation since each individual case is often dealt with to conform with each different context, ending up in winning the battle but losing the war. Solutions, arguably, can be found where this consistency has been achieved, rare as it may be.
The verb to be, essential and common in English but non-existent in Chinese, is a typical case of vocabulary incompatibility; this paper will investigate how it is translated into Chinese and what Chinese expressions can be translated into English with verb to be as the verb of the predicate—by examining Shan Te-hsing’s Chinese translation of Gulliver’s Travel and David Hawkes’ English translation of The Story of the Stone. Both of the source texts are iconic and canonized masterpieces in their own literary traditions; both of the translations, arguably, have been esteemed as exceptional translational achievements in their own languages.
It is the goal to demonstrate how the incompatible existential situation of the verb to be can be abridged between English and Chinese through parallelly comparing the two translational masterpieces in question.
Authors:
Xavier Lin, National Chi Nan University, Taiwan
About the Presenter(s)
Dr Xavier Lin is a University Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at National Chi Nan University in Taiwan
See this presentation on the full schedule – Wednesday Schedule
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