Difference Between Chinese Language And Chinese Language

English and Chinese Language impact on mind and cross cultural translation

Although there is no enough scientific evidence to show the strong form of Sapir-wolf hypothesis holds, but there are already enough examples to show that language relativity is true and language do have impact on our thinking. This paper will talk about the main differences of Chinese and English, and then show some examples of different impact on worldview of the two languages on one’s mind such as counterfactual thinking and finally discuss the difficulty on translation between two languages.

1. Main differences on Chinese and English and potential impact on mind

One of the most important differences between English and Chinese is that English is a phonographic

English has clear verb conjunctions form to distinct time point at past, now and future but Chinese does have clear distinction between now, past and future. For example, sentences such as “I have finished homework yesterday.” “I am finishing homework now” and “I will finish homework tomorrow.” We can easily know the time order from verb conjunctions without the time adverbial. But in Chinese,”我昨天完成了作業。’ ‘我現在正在完成作業’”我明天將會完成作業。We cannot see any differences on verbs and can only know the time by words 昨天（yesterday），現在（now），明天(tomorrow).Since there is no clear distinction on now and future in Chinese, according to Keith Chen’s research ,People using futureless language such as Chinese are 30% more likely to save in any year and retire with 25% savings than English().There are also some grammar differences such as English have direct counterfactual tone and mechanism for changing adjective to nouns and will be discussed in later part.

According to Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language has impact on people worldview such as the famous example that people view “empty’ oil buckets less dangerous than ‘full’ oil buckets. English and Chinese language do have impact on speakers’ world view and cognitive process. For example, in English we use “before” and “after” to show time order but in Chinese we use ” 上個月 “”下一年”’前一天‘“後一天”meaning “上 下 前 后”can all denote time order. Experiments from B ()shows English speakers tend to use horizontal

For example, the sentence ‘The river have been dried for a long time. Everyone attended the funeral can be hard for a Chinese to understand the connection between “river having been dried” and” attending the funeral’ if they do not know the ancient western story that river dries means river of the god die. Similarly, it would be hard for English speakers to understand traditional Chinese poems and idioms. For example, “人曾为僧，人弗可以成佛；女卑是婢，女又何妨成奴”was considered as intranslable by scholar Qian Ge chuan and was translated by another scholar Xu yuan chong as A Buddhist cannot bud into a Buddha, a maiden maybe made housemaid ().But although it is translated, the tone and hidden connection of Chinese characters cannot be fully translated, (since