Chinese and Logics

Object Oriented Characters

Strictly Logical Grammar

Disturbing the Linguistic Balance

An other example of a very confusing translation is the film title "Never say never again". A European might feel that this sentence isn't built around any strange logic, and would probably just look up the Chinese translation of the word "never" in a dictionary. If you do so, then you are bound to find the phrase "yong3 bu4", and you think that you can use it to build a direct translation. Wrong! The little word "bu4" (i.e. "not") is used only to state facts, and not to give instructions. One might say that the word "not" actually has got two different meanings; stating a fact (as in "You are not/never sad") and giving an instruction: (as in "You must not/never be sad!"). If you translate the sentence "Never say never again" word by word to Chinese, then you will probably mix up the negations of type 2 with type 1. If a Chinese person then tries to translate your phrase back to English, you might get something like "You never say that something is always not again" – but most likely you would get a very confused glare.

Have I lost you? Well, I can assure you that I've spent ours, or even days, trying to work out the logic in this horrible phrase. Hey! I spent more than two hours thinking through how to write this explanation of the problem!

If you still are reading, then I will give you a hint to the solution of the problem. If the word "never" is used in an instruction written in Chinese, then you should usually specify both an object and an action clearly, as in "You must not do that" instead of a short "Don't!". If you want to make a general statement, then you must still state object and action, though they may be void, i.e. replaced by words like "someone" or "something". To solve the translation at hand, you will probably have to create a rather watery paraphrase that is at least twice as long as the crisp and rather powerful English sentence; "You must at all times avoid saying 'not ever again'" ("Yong3yuan3 bu4 gai1 shuo1 'yong3yuan3 zai4 bu4'" or possibly "Yong3yuan3 bie2 zai4 shuo1 'yong3yuan3 bie2 zai4') – but a Chinese person would most likely prefer using some ideomatic expression that is less "direct"...

A good sense of logics won't hurt when you study Chinese, and if you are not a philosopher before you start to learn the language, then you surely will get a certain interest for that subject as well in due time! ';-)

Oh, and P.S.: Please note that "Never say never again" actually can be interpreted in more than one way!