Problems With English Translation
Due to confusion with synonyms during translation, some of the animals depicted by the English words did not exist in ancient China. For example, 羊 can mean Ram, Goat, or Sheep. Similarly, 鼠 (Rat) can also be translated as Mouse, as there are no distinctive words for the two genera in Chinese. Further, 豬 (Pig) is sometimes translated to Boar after its Japanese name, and 牛 plainly means Cow or Ox, and not Water Buffalo, 水牛. 雞(Rooster) may mean chicken, hen, rooster, cock. However, Rooster is the most commonly used one among all the synonyms, same for 羊,鼠, etc.
Read more about this topic: Chinese Zodiac
Famous quotes containing the words problems with, problems, english and/or translation:
“The mother’s and father’s attitudes toward the child correspond to the child’s own needs.... Mother has the function of making him secure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“As our disorderly, competitive technological society is piling up its victims and constantly developing new problems of maladjustment, we must use our scientific knowledge to determine the cause and prevention of suffering rather than putting all our emphasis on its alleviation ...”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“The mob has many heads but no brains.”
—17th-century English proverb, collected in Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia (1732)
“Well meant are the wounds a friend inflicts, but profuse are the kisses of an enemy.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 27:6.
KJ translation reads: Faithful are the wounds of a friend.