Lost in Translation

I've decided not to trust the Chinese translation of English books any more.

I tried to read Chapter 1 of the Chinese translation of Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist first and found it very difficult to follow.

I then decided to check the English original and discovered some blatant errors in translation. They reflect on the quality of Chinese translators.


Example One:

"... It's easy to see the difference between nineteenth-century farming and twenty-first-century frothing, but not so easy to see the similarity before it is pointed out to us. Economics is partly about modelling, about articulating basic principles and patterns that operate behind seemingly complex subjects like the rent on farms or coffee bars."

Here the author is making use of David Ricardo's rent theory for farmlands to explain the high price of a cup of Starbucks coffee and the scarcity of prime spots for coffee shops and thus their high rent.

The Chinese translation《卧底经济学》translated by 赵恒 published by 中信出版社 tranlated the first sentence as:

"… 19世纪的农业生产和21世纪的经济泡沫之间的差别是显而已见的，但在未言明之前，两者之间的相似性却难以察觉。…"

Frothing as in "twenty-first-century frothing" means coffee-making but it was translated as 经济泡沫。 What an imagination!


Example Two:

"... Ricardo treated the whole agricultural sector as if it were one vast farm with a single landlord. A unified agricultural sector had nothing to gain from improving the land's productivity with roads or irrigation, because those improvements would also reduce the scarcity of good land. But an individual landlord in competition with the others would have plenty of incentive to make improvements. ... Ricardo failed to realise that thousands of landlords competing with each other would make different decisions than a single one."

Here the Chinese translator came up with a translation that's the very opposite of what the author means. The translator failed to understand that by REDUCING the SCARCITY of good land, MORE good land will become available. Instead it's translated that good land will DECREASE as a result of better roads or irrigation.

So the Chinese translation goes:

"… 如果农业部门是统一的，那么提高土地生产率（如改进道路或灌溉系统）就不能增加收益，因为这些改进措施还会减少本已稀缺的优质土地。…"

This kind of shoddy translations do not help Chinese readers orstudents at all. 这类急就章中文翻译不知害了多少中文读者和学生。