"中国人怎么过新年?"
Translation:How do Chinese people spend New Year's?
66 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
The plural "years" works for referring to actual new years, but the question is still potentially fraught when talking about the event.
In other words, how do we pluralize "New Year's"? Is it "New Years' ", short for "New Years' Eves" or "New Years' Days", or is it perhaps "New Year'ses" (which seems unlikely ever to be said out loud)?
Probably the best way to do it is just to leave it as "New Year's", as we can refer to one New Year's Eve, or two or more New Year's Eves, and "How do Chinese people celebrate New Year's" suggests the general case anyway, as would "How do Germans celebrate Christmas", so no plural is really necessary in most contexts.
I think Duo is "trying" to get A decent initial translation and expand based on comments. I've had a lot of issues with translations being transliterations that were too inflexible or translations that ignored cases where transliterations actually parsed better in English than the very different "correct" answer of similar meaning, but I have to give Duo credit for adopting many suggested additional translations to broaden the accepted English answer set.
I take your point, but there are a number of counterpoints. Here are just a few:
- "华人" is clearer in reference to people of Chinese descent in general, but "中国人" is open to interpretation, as is "the Chinese". In English, "the Chinese" can refer politically to the country of China, or it can refer to citizens of China living anywhere in the world, or it can refer to people of Chinese descent that operate mostly in their native language and culture regardless of whether they're Chinese citizens, depending on the context.
- Even when arguing for a limited meaning, many commenters include people from places like Malaysia and Taiwan in the term "中國人". And among the Taiwanese Chinese people that I know, I don't know any that don't consider themselves to be 中國人. (Taiwan is a special case politically, but this also applies to people in other countries. So where do we draw the line?)
- This question doesn't specify that it's not talking about Chinese citizens.
- "People in China" (your term) and "Chinese citizens" are not synonymous expressions. There are many foreigners in China at all times.
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Context is often important in considering these sorts of questions.
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I wrote "how do chinese people celebrate a new year" and got marked wrong, though it is correct.
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Your insistence on using “New Year’s” shows your translator’s ignorance. Just say,”How do Chinese people celebrate New Year.”