Talk:梦想消逝的青年 (Mèngxiǎng Xiāoshì de Qīngnián)/@comment-26822286-20150726141412/@comment-5514019-20150805100837

omg thank you so much! lol, yeah, you got me. I'm american chinese - my parents speak it but I don't, and my reading is pretty horrible >>; but I really love this song so >>;;;;;; some of these points were just me trying to make it flow better, I'll go through them one by one (sorry if this is a little hard to understand - I'm pretty tired right now)


 * oh, that makes it much clearer. I wasn't sure if the song had some kind of vague thing where the subject was unclear or if it was doing what you said so I just went with the literal translation.


 * for this one, I couldn't really think of a wording that flowed well without strongly implying the person was suicidal, but I'll think more on this.


 * oh, I thought this meant, literally, "stuff I wrote on books" like stuff doodled in the margins of textbooks and so on. is that an american thing...? I guess they were just school daily journals or something :P


 * I think I understood what that meant but somehow the idea of it being a superpower got lost. I probably tried to think of it like in saved by the bell (if you don't know - it's a sitcom from the 90's where there's a character that can randomly stop time, but it's usually used in a self-aware way to talk to the audience or manipulate the plot and not as a superpower), and I ended up changing the wording way too much.


 * I knew that but it's just my personal preference (I like to keep it real or something). I'll change that :P


 * I picked "immigration" here because "leaving the country" has a slight implication of fleeing the country for your crimes, at least where I am. it kind of gave it a weird tone.


 * oooh, that makes much more sense. thanks!


 * I did know this but couldn't think of a way to get it into the line. I guess I prioritize the form a bit too much; however I think "2 or 3 dimensions" generally gets the idea across while keeping the idiom and length.


 * oh, thank you! this was probably the line I understood the least. I've never heard of that before. that makes the whole stanza much more clear, actually!


 * for this one, I did know that but picked "handwriting" for cultural reasons. I think the literal translation of "calligraphy" just works much better in chinese since calligraphy is more of a common thing and maybe a kid would like, learn calligraphy in school and try to make their handwriting fancy. on the other hand, here, nearly everyone either has horrible handwriting or writes more or less like this, and no one would refer to it as "calligraphy." and of course "brushstrokes" is associated with painting pictures and not writing. again, it's different because of my personal priorities w.r.t. translating through cultural differences. sorry to get so long-winded!

as for that idiom, usually I do try to look up phrases like that but for some I can't really understand the explanation either, and for others like this one I just didn't realize it was an idiom to start with (._.##

again, thank you very much! I'm actually surprised some of it got as close as it did. in particular I was sure I made mistakes in a lot of the more abstract stuff (like "现实的火葬场" or "字迹逐渐消逝纸张也泛黄"). I'll try to ask more questions and get more feedback before posting next time, maybe ask my mom about stuff :P