ELISA ENGLISH's Blog 英語園地

Contrapasso是指靈魂在但丁地獄中的贖罪過程，他們在人世中犯下多少的罪孽,在地獄裡就必須接受多少的處罰。字面翻譯是“處罰符合罪行”, 有以其人之道，還治其人之身的含義, 類似18層地獄。

例如:

1: /不要吃別人智慧

Don’t steal other people’s wisdom

Here, you cannot translate Chinese to English word for word.  "不要吃” cannot be translated as “don’t eat”.  That would be wrong.  In a sense, "不要吃" means "不要盜", because if you take something that is not yours, it is a stealing.

請問 wait on , wait for 之間可以畫等號嗎？

No. 在 “等待” 的含義上有一些不同.    

中翻英:  相見歡 - 詩詞翻譯

I like this poem.  It sounds so sentimental.  These are some of my translations.  Since I am not very good in Chinese, I may not get the meaning of the poem completely.  If I have misinterpreted the meaning of the poem from the source I found, please provide me your comments.

Learning French

This is a website that I would recommend if you are learning French as an adult.  It provides French lessons in audios, so you are learning accurate pronunciation from a French local.  It touches grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary as well as some French Literature. 

I recently came across a link recommended by someone answering questions on Yahoo knowledge.  The link is http://expertvillage.com/ .   She believes that you will become an expert in English in no time by watching the videos offered by expertvillage.  Out of curiosity, I clicked the link and found out that it is very similar to YouTube.  I did not go any further into watching the videos.  I am a lazy person and I have never watched any videos from YouTube either.  I prefer watching videos from a big TV screen.

Anyway, I asked her why she would recommend it.  Her response was that it encompasses a wide variety of do-it-yourself topics.  By watching the videos, you get to increase your vocabulary and improve your listening skill.  (I have reworded what she stated but kept the essence of what she was trying to portray)

空洞的威脅

All bark and no bite

= empty threat

空口說白話

All hat, no cattle (All hat and no cattle)

= Big hat, no cattle

Get something into one’s head
(1) = to begin to think that something is true even though there is no good reason for believing it.

Or

Le rire, c’est le soleil; il chasse l’hiver du visage humain (French)

English Translation: