Chinese style vs. English style

[trooper]

I can think of two differences between the style of well-written Chinese and the style of well-written English. Something that sounds good in Chinese is terrible in English and vice versa. Even I notice this. but I don't know why something sounds good in one language but not the other.

1) Good written Chinese employs well-known set phrases and sayings (成语 and 歇后语) to connect the piece of writing with the Chinese literary tradition. This makes the piece of writing seem more vivid and refined. Good written English avoids these and calls them cliches. Using well-known phrases in a piece of written English makes it irritating and inelegant.

2) Good written Chinese uses 虚词 and repeats words that have the same meaning or purpose to give balance and elegance to its sentences. For example Chinese uses things like 也…也…, 但是…却…, 因为…所以…. If you do a similar thing in English, you add flab and reduce clarity.

Am I right?

Why do these differences arise?

[roddy]

This is a subject close to my heart as I spend most of my working hours changing Chinese-style English into more English-style English. Obviously I'm working with English translations and not the Chinese, but it would be daft not to pretend the Chinese has a huge influence on what the English looks like.

Bearing in mind that I tend to work mostly with formal / official documents I think the biggest differences (excluding things that are just mistakes) are

1) Repetition. Reusing the same phrases (usually noun phrases) again and again, instead of 'it', 'we' or 'you'. Also phrases like 'investigate and examine' and 'own and have'.

2) Wordiness. 'In order to raise the rate of efficency, advance the progress of modernisation and firmly build a well-off society . . .' - and that's before the sentence even really starts. I'd cut that right down to something like 'For efficiency, modernisation and . . .'.

3) Overuse of relative clauses - especially intrusive when combined with 1) - 'The committee established to organise the event will . . .' instead of 'The event-organising committee will'.

That's 5 words instead of 8, and if it appears 10 times on a one page document you've removed 30 words.

4) 'Empty' phrases. These are one of the things I find strangest, very common in contracts, laws, regulations. Why does a contract need to specify 'The two parties will follow the rules of this contract'? Of course they will, it's a contract. That's what contracts are for. If you didn't say 'This law will be strictly obeyed', could we run around committing crimes and then when we got caught say 'Yeah, I know there's a law, but you didn't tell me I had to obey it'?

That's all I can think of at the moment but I'll start paying more attention at work. In general though, it's always a case of extra words rather than anything being omitted - when I've finished with something it's usually 10-20% shorter.

Roddy

[eric]

I'm not sure i totally agree that idioms make piece of chinese writing good. They can certainly make some things more eloquent, but they're not necessary at all. In fact, I think they can even be distracting and misleading since people can interpret them differently. Then again, sometimes they are just perfect for describing something you're concerned with. Sometimes it's more like refering to a whole story or stream of events (or even a recent movie).. hard to classify them as generally good imho.

[ala]

Good Chinese writers use very little idioms. It's the slightly above mediocre writers who use them excessively.

Also, on more discussion-based BBS posts, the Chinese prefer to use idioms and repetition to drive the point home, as readers are less careful and tend to skim. The point is easy to miss when skimming since there's no word spacing. Chinese characters are concise enough to allow for repetition without becoming a visual hindrance. Understand also that Chinese has little inflection, so clauses are inherently a little wordy (unfortunately this habit of wordiness gets transferred to foreign languages too).

[ax]

my old rules of thumb...

it's all about balance...

balance long sentences with short ones..

balance long word with short ones....

balance the use of idioms, not excessively...

balance the use of foreign terms...

ax

[trooper]

Roddy, I've seen similar things before. If I read an article written in Chinese and make a literal translation of it into grammatical English, the result will always be too wordy; many phrases will need rewriting. If I tried to translate into Chinese something I wrote in English, I would always produce something that sounds crude and unnatural to a native speaker of Chinese. Someone advised me that I should think in Chinese and not in English when I write Chinese. This is easier said than done. My Chinese vocabulary is too limited to express all the thoughts I have.

Another problem is that I don't know what constitutes good style in written Chinese. Ala, your rules make a lot of sense. Good prose is usually what is pleasing to the ear.

Sometimes, I have asked for help from Chinese people, but not always with success. I have found that different native speakers disagree with each other. I once got a short essay of mine corrected by someone but her corrections were re-corrected by someone else!

This second native speaker also told me that I should always use “如果…的话，…就…”in place of "如果…，…就…”. I don't agree with this 'rule' by the way.

[eric]

i hate seeing english words mixed in with chinese like ahQ and AA zhi jia. wth is that all about?

Is it a general rule now not to translate names and other nouns into Chinese (like "Linux")?

[bathrobe]

Just a point:

Chinese 'idioms' 成语 are very concise but they can be hard to translate -- there are no fixed ways of translating them, and directly translated they sound weird. Integrating them into an English translation involves breaking them down, possibly weeding them out.

Although concise, they also contribute to a tendency to purple prose. Chinese style sounds very flamboyant compared to English. Even an average little pond in a city park comes out as a 'rippling lake of jade waters' or some such expression (I just made that one up, don't go looking for the original Chinese!)

As for Roddy's point about

Wordiness. 'In order to raise the rate of efficency, advance the progress of modernisation and firmly build a well-off society . . .' - and that's before the sentence even really starts

I would say that has a lot to do with Chinese politics and bureaucracy. That is, in order to indicate that your decision is backed by the prevailing official line, you start by saying so. In fact, the rest of your memo may be completely at odds with the prevailing official line, but you have to start by giving it lip service!

It would be interesting to see how people wrote memos 20 years ago or 30 years ago (Maybe something like 'In order to advance the great proletarian revolution and defeat the class enemies of the people, ...., we the Political Committee of Red Gulch Commune propose building a bike shed beside the communal latrines.')

But of course, English has its own problems with jargon by people trying to walk the walk and talk the talk, which has been lampooned and criticised by many.

[djwebb2004]

I can think of two differences between the style of well-written Chinese and the style of well-written English. Something that sounds good in Chinese is terrible in English and vice versa. Even I notice this. but I don't know why something sounds good in one language but not the other.

1) Good written Chinese employs well-known set phrases and sayings (成语 and 歇后语) to connect the piece of writing with the Chinese literary tradition. This makes the piece of writing seem more vivid and refined. Good written English avoids these and calls them cliches. Using well-known phrases in a piece of written English makes it irritating and inelegant.

2) Good written Chinese uses 虚词 and repeats words that have the same meaning or purpose to give balance and elegance to its sentences. For example Chinese uses things like 也…也…, 但是…却…, 因为…所以…. If you do a similar thing in English, you add flab and reduce clarity.

Am I right?

Why do these differences arise?

While it is true that Chinese tends to be written with a lot of chengyu, I disagree that it is just a difference between English and Chinese that "good" Chinese is so written. A more perceptive comment would be that: Chinese children have their work cut out learning characters and chengyu, and spend nearly all their time on that - and so good style is not taught. It is not a good style in any language to list cliche after cliche after cliche. Some paragraphs of allegedly good Chinese are just 20 chengyu listed one after the other. As far as I can see this is not actually good Chinese, but evidence that good writing style is not on the syllabus in China.

[gato]

Chinese vernacular prose writing is in its first century development. If you look at English or other European prose written from three, four hundred years ago, you'll find them cliched and unnecessarily verbose, as well, I think. Probably a result of inferiority complex as compared to Latin.

The overuse of chengyu (borrowed from classical Chinese) comes from a lack of confidence in the vernacular and a relative dearth of sophisticated vernacular vocabulary. It may be relevant to note that many modern Chinese words are borrowed from Japanese and English. Many of the pioneering vernacular Chinese writers studied in Japan (e.g. Lu Xun, Guo Moruo) and the West (e.g. Hu Shi, Xu Zhimo, Ba Jin).

[xiaocai]

While it is true that Chinese tends to be written with a lot of chengyu

It is not a good style in any language to list cliche after cliche after cliche. Some paragraphs of allegedly good Chinese are just 20 chengyu listed one after the other.

I highly disagree with this. If any new Chinese learner tries use lots of chengyu in their writing one after another, it just makes it worse. You may find about three to four so-called "set-phrase" in a 2000-character good Chinese article, but it's only when the right words are at right places.

Chinese children have their work cut out learning characters and chengyu, and spend nearly all their time on that

I think you might just want to exaggerate a bit to make the point clearer, cause back when I was in school, chengyu are treated in the same way as other words in the vocabulary, and there was no seperate list for chengyu in our textbook.

To gato:

I think this is a good point. But it makes feel like its just a preference between "borrowing words from classical Chinese" and "borrowing words from foreign laguages". It was not easy to create a new word for a new concept and let everyone know and accept it just 20 years ago. But now, with the information boost like internet, new words are coming up everyday and spreading out, which I feel is having a huge impact on vernacular writing. Yet it doesn't means when can simply cut off the chengyu from our vocabulary, it should be gradual process and incomplete, because some of them have been accepted as colloquial words and used in daily life, while some others are still only used in writting with much less frequence.

Anyway, I won't attempt to summarize what makes the Good writing standard so different in the two languages, but I'll try to avoid "grammatical comparison" at here, basically because they are just too different from each other...

But I have to say, one thing I think that makes written Chinese look a bit wordy sometimes is the lack of inflection, and therefore long clauses are used to minimize ambiguities...

[djwebb2004]

I am gratified that ala agreed in her contribution to the thread that only poorer writers overload on chengyu.

I am thinking of this sort of paragraph:

该文说，上班期间闲聊天、玩游戏、打扑克，接待群众的时候吃水果、说话态度恶劣、推诿扯皮……这些触目惊心的“衙门作风”，这些行为引发的结果是“办事难、行为不规范、素质不高、作风不实、效率低下、文山会海和迎来送往”等共性问题。

他们好吃懒做，热衷于拉拉扯扯，巧言令色，欺上瞒下，影响、劝说和引诱官员最终使官员跌进潜规则陷阱不能自拔从而助长潜规则进一步发展。

These paragraphs can be translated into English, but not natural English, because at a certain point they descent into reeling off lists of cliches. This is what I call 垃圾中文 . By contrast, Lu Xun, who is meant to be model for written Chinese today hardly used any chengyu at all in his diary of the madman (I spotted two in the whole work!)

Another point is officialese/translationese. There is a book called "Modern Chinese", a very good book written by a Chinese professor of Chinese about modern Chinese. My PDF version no longer works since I reinstalled Windows (ebooks are more hassle than they're worth), so I can't give an exact quote. But the author of that book said that long sentences with attributive clause after attributive clause connected by 的 's are not in fact natural Chinese. You know the sort of sentences where you have to wait until line 10 before getting the object of the sentence, and by that time you have forgotten what it was about. These sentences are just copying Western relative clauses. In natural Chinese, and in classical Chinese, there is a rhythm to the language, with much smaller clauses and units. But: as officialese is government Chinese, many Chinese would regard it as "good Chinese", although it is actually unnatural Chinese.

[Lu]

Commas instead of full stops. Chinese sentences can go on and on and on, for an entire paragraph, without a period, but commas instead. They can usually easily be broken into different sentences in translation. Not sure why Chinese like their sentences so long, it would be very bad writing in English or Dutch, but seems to be considered fine in Chinese.

But the author of that book said that long sentences with attributive clause after attributive clause connected by 的 's are not in fact natural Chinese. (...) In natural Chinese, and in classical Chinese, there is a rhythm to the language, with much smaller clauses and units. But: as officialese is government Chinese, many Chinese would regard it as "good Chinese", although it is actually unnatural Chinese.

So officialnese is then basically a new kind of classical Chinese, you have to learn it like a different language and it very different from how people actually speak. (Would be very hard to speak that way, wouldn't it, the speaker themself would get lost in the clauses before they got to the end of the sentence.)

[gato]

Chinese sentences can go on and on and on, for an entire paragraph, without a period, but commas instead.

Chinese sentences are supposed to contain an idea, as opposed to a subject-predicate clause in European grammar. That's why Chinese students tend to write run-on sentences when they write in English. They are also careless about leaving a space after punctuation marks.

[wushijiao]

Is Chinese style worse than English, or the other way around? I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. My gut reaction is that Chinese prose is horrible compared to good prose in English, but the huge caveat there is that I don't understand Chinese well enough to really get some of the better prose.

I hate to sound like a broken record on these forums, but, it is a safe bet that if horrible prose exists in Chinese, it is because of the people who censor and regulate everything.

The best prose that I have read, by far, is Wang Lixiong's book about Tibet (which of course only exists outide of the PRC). It contained a great mixture of slang and idioms, images and theory, but above all, honesty and directness. My favorite essay of all time is Orwell's "Politics and the English Language", in which he talks about how bad habits cause horrible writing, and even unclear thought.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

I think Wang Lixiong's writing fully lives up to the spirit that Orwell was promoting in that essay. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, you can read Wang's critique of Chinese modern writing in the link below (translated by Joel Martinsen of Danwei 加油！):

http://www.danwei.org/state_media/china_writers_association_what.php

So, I personally have a hunch that because of the Chinese language's rich traditions and diverse slang, it has the possibility of being one of the best written languages in the world, but right now, the best of the written language is penciled out and deleted by the thought police.

[DrZero]

I think there is writing on both sides of spectrum (great vs. wretched) in any language, probably to equal extents. I think it's useless to ask which language has better or worse writing. The writing is just a tool for expression of ideas and it can be used well or poorly in any language. It's like asking which kind of paint is more expressive, blue or red. It all depends on how you use it on the canvas.

[gato]

I think it's useless to ask which language has better or worse writing.

But it does make sense to ask which society/country has better writing. No?

[griz326]

A very enjoyable thread. I wish I knew enough about Chinese to contribute. I do not.

I suspect that DrZero is correct.

[gato]

good style is not taught. It is not a good style in any language to list cliche after cliche after cliche. Some paragraphs of allegedly good Chinese are just 20 chengyu listed one after the other. As far as I can see this is not actually good Chinese, but evidence that good writing style is not on the syllabus in China.

I hate to sound like a broken record on these forums, but, it is a safe bet that if horrible prose exists in Chinese, it is because of the people who censor and regulate everything.

A major reason for the cliched writing is the amount of time students spent on training to write essays for high school and college entrance exams. Grading for these standardized test has an ideological purity component. "Unhealthy thoughts" (不健康思想) are not permitted. So students learn to write "blah, blah," embellished with lots of fancy chengyus. If the CCP ruled the U.K. or U.S., English essays might be the same way.

A result of this is that many Chinese writers are not good at channeling negative feelings into constructive and logical criticisms. It's not rare to see illogical or at least largely emotionally-based rants in otherwise well-respected publications. Chinese students are well trained use logic in solving math and physics problems, but not when approaching historical or social issues, which most essays in the English language are concerned with.

[yonitabonita]

Chinese students are well trained use logic in solving math and physics problems, but not when approaching historical or social issues, which most essays in the English language are concerned with.

I think identifies the source of the problem I have with reading many essays in Chinese. Reading essays in textbooks, in the 'model essays' I'm given to emulate in class, and Chinese magazines, I find myself in constantly tsk tsking away at what I consider to be leaping assumptions, breaks in logical flow, and fiesty unrestrained emotion posing as reason.

I'm not at all opposed to emotions - it's healthy to have them, but reading emotional tirades in essays can be unsatisfying to me when evidence can be so much cleverer - not to mention convincing.

So, after all that, thankyou. Well put!

y