(no subject)

[thevetia]

I have a weird little question on translation choices that I hope somebody here can answer for me about grammar.

I've seen some c-novels translated in present tense and some in past tense and I've wondered if there is something in the Chinese that makes one tense more accurate than the other, or if it's the translator's English tense preference.

I know that Chinese doesn't have tenses the way Indo-European languages do, but for Chinese speakers, does English present tense accurately reflect the feel of the narration in Chinese? While reading Chinese does one mentally suspend defining "past" while reading until a specific time marker indicates past action, so that everything mentally takes place in the "present" until told otherwise? Or is it like the traditional English "narrative past" that serves as a neutral tense for story-telling?

For example, how in Chinese would you distinguish between:

'Zhao Yunlan drives to the university.' (narrative present)

'Zhao Yunlan drove to the university.' (narrative past)

'Zhao Yunlan says to Shen Wei that he drove to the university.' (narrative present relating a past action)

'Zhao Yunlan said to Shen Wei that he drove to the university.' (narrative past relating a past action)

And just to be difficult: 'Zhu Hong suspects that Zhao Yunlan said to Shen Wei that he drove to the university, and then he takes/took him there.' (narrative present relating past actions at 2 different times)

Are all these distinctions in English unnecessary in Chinese?

Comments

[sartorias]

Total beginner here, but I'll hazard a guess just to be corrected, and learn therefrom.

In the first sentence, "drives" do you mean is driving now? (zhengzai kai che) or he's in the habit of driving? (kai che)

It seems to me that the most important distinction is whether or not an act has been completed. It can be in present, past, or future, it can be passive (done to the subject), but that "le" will be in there, either right after the verb or at the end of the sentence, depending on other structures in the sentence.

As for when things happen in time, Chinese has a ton of verb structures to make those things clear. "Jiu" and "cai" and verb-zhe verb, and of course the various references to time, like deshihou.

OK, I gave it a shot. I hope someone will tell me where I am dead wrong so I can learn.

[grayswandir]

(Another tentative answer from someone who is not at all fluent -- corrections very welcome!)

Coming at this question from a bit of a different angle: I think the thing is, narrative tenses are mostly just a matter of convention even in English. Like, past tense is considered neutral if you're writing a novel, but present tense is neutral in other cases, such as for a story summary. If I were writing an episode recap for Guardian, I'd probably say "in this episode, Zhao Yunlan tells Shen Wei that he drove to the university," but if I were writing a fanfic, I'd say "Zhao Yunlan told Shen Wei that he had driven to the university." My choice of tense would be based on what I considered neutral/natural in context, rather than on how "past" I wanted the event to feel for the reader.

I can only speculate about how well the different English tenses might reflect the narrative feel of a Chinese novel, but my impression is that the reason Cnovels aren't all translated into the same English tense is because there isn't anything in the Chinese to make one tense obviously more correct than the other. Past tense is the normal storytelling tense in English, so you could say it's the obvious correct choice to mirror natural storytelling in Chinese... But present tense gives a more general feeling of something happening without specific reference to a point in time, which is more like the way Chinese verbs work... I imagine they could both be seen as "more correct," in different ways, which would explain why different translators make different choices.

As for your example sentences, I think the distinctions really don't matter in Chinese (or even exist, in terms of tense). As sartorias says, you just want to convey the sequence of events -- which one came first, second, third; which one was already completed before the next one happened -- but it really doesn't matter whether or not you specify that the whole sequence is in the past. The important thing is when the events happened relative to each other, and you've got stuff like 正在, 然后, 了, 已经, etc. to do that.

[thevetia]

Thank you! That does feel like the way for me to navigate Chinese verbal patterns: that it has to do with the order of when things happen, rather than the English emphasis on position on an absolute timeline.

[externalities]

While reading Chinese does one mentally suspend defining "past" while reading until a specific time marker indicates past action, so that everything mentally takes place in the "present" until told otherwise
I never thought about it before, but this perfectly describes my experience when reading narratives in Chinese. Unless I have reason (whether from unspoken context or the narrative explicitly signalling that the events described took place in the past) I'll assume everything is going on in the present.

[presumenothing]

Very much a matter of preference – I'm firmly in favour of past tense (even though I use almost solely present tense for writing fic), but the only objective(ish) argument I can think of is that the basically-omniscient-third-person-POV tone of most cnovels fit past better than present, at least imo. Also past tense being the neutral/default for English mainstream novels, though that in itself begs the usual question of how closely translations need to adopt the conventions of the target language.

And as externalities noted, you kinda assume things are happening in the in-story present unless otherwise indicated by the narrative? Completely divorced from context, I don't think it's generally easy to tell if a sentence is referring to events from 5,000 years ago the past.