Fenster writes:

The level of English comprehension among my Chinese students is far above the level of Chinese comprehension among American students of Chinese.  But it is not great, and I have been thinking about how to make my lectures clearer.  I start by slowing down.  Then I methodically employ Power Point, making sure to make connections between the written word and speech since the students’ reading comprehension is often better than their understanding of spoken English.

Still there are gaps, and I realize that it is often the key word in a given slide that is the culprit.  If you want to discuss philanthropy, for instance, that word plays a central role in any discussion.  But that may be the very word that throws them off.  So I have taken to using Google Translate.

I won’t use it for sentences since it is unreliable at that level.  But it can be pretty good at words and short phrases.  So I will often add Chinese characters for terms like philanthropy (慈善事业, I hope) to my slides, and it seems to do a good job getting over one of the many communications humps inherent in the situation.

From time to time, though, Google Translate will return an answer that seems curiously revealing.  I wanted to find the Chinese term for “government policy”–the regular, lower-case term for the basic thing that government does as it undertakes action.  When you take the Chinese term for the term and re-translate it back into English, you find you get a subtle difference:

Just a tiny difference . . .won’t hurt a bit!

“The Government’s policy”.

It is as though the term does not exist as a generic phrase.  There is only the Current Government, and it has The Government’s Policy.  There is no need for a general way of saying it.