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Chinese Translation Step-by-Step
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<< point to character for translation Our goal is to translate the sign at left. It typifies placards popular in Chinese
culture. A shopkeeper or home owner might display it on the front door.
Rosewood frames the characters cut from jade to look just like brush calligraphy on paper.
It's our example translation because it's typical and, for beginners such as myself, troublesome. |
Context
L anguage paints on the canvas of context. The placard above comes to us out of context, so I researched its probable origins. The antique dealer who sold it to me said the piece belonged to a Chinese mainland family before the revolution.|
They fled from Mao's forces to Taiwan, where a family member sold it to the antique dealer. The sign could have come from a shop or home, the dealer knew no more. It's an orphaned political refugee. If from a shop, it might have been the main sign for the shop itself, or just a good luck sign. It's good luck that Dadaism wasn't popular there at the time, we'd have no hope of a sensible translation... |
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Reading Characters
Read Chinese the way you read English, left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Each character is a word and has a meaning by itself. They have a different meaning when taken two or more at a time. The placard seemed to have several possible meanings depending on how you group the characters.
Identifying Characters
The characters look like brush strokes on paper. The artisan shaped the
varied jade hues perfectly, as if writing with liquid stone. The
calligraphy is highly stylized and hard to match with
dictionary typographic characters. Look at the second and fifth
jade characters above compared to their calligraphy counterparts.
Calligraphic dictionaries such as
Ocrat.com
provided some
of the images above.
I checked the second and fifth characters by stroke count and by radical (similar to root word) independently to be certain of my identification. If you're not dealing with artsy calligraphs you won't have to learn radicals and stroke counts right away.
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