#5 - Specific Reference, Must Be True, Purpose

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below!

[nrpandolfo]

Can you please explain choice A a bit more? Can we really conclude just because dang tang is written next to downtown that thats what the author means?

[Alex Bodaken]

nrpandolfo,

Thanks for the question! You are right that it wouldn't be enough to conclude just because "dang-tang" is written near "downtown" that they are related, but the passage links them together in meaning. The author writes of some distinctive vocabulary: "Some are transliterated terms, such as dang-tang for 'downtown.'" This links the two terms together: the author is clearly saying that "dang-tang" is the transliterated version of "downtown."

Our task then is to suss out which answer choice best correlates to what dang-tang represents as a transliterated version of downtown, and answer choice (A) provides us with that: it is a word that keeps similar sounds and meanings to the original English word, which is basically what answer choice (A) describes. That makes it our credited answer.

Hope that helps!
Alex

[KhaliaCWilliams]

Can you explain why A is better than B?

I thought that B was saying that each word was apart of the American experience, which it is, and the evidence I used to support that was "..those born and raised in villages had never encountered in China..."

thank you!

[James Finch]

Hi Khalia,

This question is asking us to define "transliterated term." In the context that the question is referencing, the example we're given of a "transliterated term" is dang-tang, the Chinatown Chinese word for "downtown." This is a direct incorportation of the same or similar sounds into the language, resulting in a very similar, new word in the language. This is very different from a direct translation, which uses existing words or phrases already translatable and simply translates them from the original language into the target language. So to Prephrase, "transliterated terms" are words brought in from another language that contain the same or similar sounds to the original word in the original language, along with the same meaning.

(A) matches the Prephrase very closely, and is the correct answer. (B) is getting at a broader idea of the necessity of bringing in new vocabulary into Chinese to the match the new things being encountered in America, of which transliterated terms are only one example.

Hope this clears things up!

[beccamarie]

I'm confused by this answer. dang tang is the sound being transliterated into Chinese, but it is specifically not the meaning--that's why I picked C. It is written the same way, but in Chinese. Much like if I put my name in Cyrillic or Japanese, using sounds from that language without regard for the meaning. What clue from the passage was I supposed to see here that let me divine that they thought meaning was appropriate, as well?

[Jeff Wren]

Hi Becca,

The first thing to recognize is that this second paragraph is discussing the distinctive vocabulary of Chinatown Chinese (lines 17-21). The paragraph then lists two different ways that these new words are created.

Transliterated terms essentially take a word in one language and then create a similar sounding word in another language that means the same thing, so in the example, "Dang-Tang" not only sounds similar to "Downtown," it is a newly created word that means "Downtown" as well. (Just to be completely clear, not because "Dang-Tang" originally meant "Downtown" but because it is now given this meaning. The Chinatown community has basically invented a new word.)

These transliterated terms are contrasted with other terms that are directly translated from American English. For these terms, the American English terms are translated into their Chinese equivalents.

For answer A, both the sound and the meaning have been directly incorporated into another language, which is what happened with "Dang-Tang."

For answer C, it is not that the words are written in the same way in another language. In other words, "Dang-Tang" is not just the word "Downtown" spelled using a Chinese language equivalent. While admittedly I'm not knowledgeable about Chinese languages and dialects, but if this were the case, there would be no reason to think that the two words would sound so similar.

[katnyc]

Can someone explain D and A. To me they sounded similar. Is it wrong because of the next sentence after that one? I am having a hard time because they sounded to me like they were the same thing just one was written better?

[Jeff Wren]

Hi Kat,

Please see my answer above for the descriptions of the two different ways that these new terms are created.

The first are the transliterated terms, which is what the question is asking about. These are newly created words that sound similar to the American English original and also keep the meaning of the American English term. The example given is "dang-tang" for "downtown." Notice how similar these words sound. This is intentional. Basically, the Chinese American community in San Francisco wanted a word that sounds like "downtown" and means "downtown," but perhaps is easier to pronounce in their languages/dialects, uses more familiar syllables, is more stylistically similar, etc..

The second way are the direct translations. Lines 23-25 "Others are direct translation from American English, such as 'gong-ngihn ngiht' for 'Labor Day.'" The word "others" is used to contrast these direct translations with the transliterated terms. Notice how "gong-ngihn ngiht" doesn't sound anything like "Labor Day" because it is not transliterated, i.e. not creating a new word that sounds like "Labor Day" the way "dang-tang" sounds like "downtown." Instead it is taking the American English words "Labor Day" and directly translating them into their Chinese language equivalents, much like the word "water" would be directly translated into Spanish as "agua."

Answer D is describing the direct translations, which is the second type of new terms. These direct translation are not transliterated terms.