A devout Christian explains the benefits of charitable giving to his neighbors. A short, 7-sentence read, but a little dense on new vocab with harder sentence structures (suitable around HSK 4-5).
Some language stuff
This read is pretty much just an exercise in picking up new vocabulary. You’ll learn good-for-the-soul words like “Christianity”, “pious”, “charity”, “donation” and “wealth”.
Grammatically, the difficult bits are in the last paragraph, which includes two rhetorical questions that aren’t quite so straightforward. I’m actually not going to explain these like I usually do, because I don’t think they’ll trip up your understanding too much, but I will highlight them below so you know where to focus your attention.
《上帝的铲子》
有个农夫信仰基督教，对上帝十分的虔诚。他为人乐善好施，经常资助贫困的人们，还向各个慈善机构捐赠大笔钱款。邻居和亲友们都不明白，他捐赠如此之多的钱财，为何仍然这么富裕？
有一天，邻人问他：“我们不明白，你捐出去那么多的钱，而且频频去施舍，可你怎么却越来越富有呢？
农夫说：“这还不好解释？你看，我用铲子不断地往上帝的仓库里铲，而上帝也不断地往我的仓库里回铲。你想想，我的铲子能有上帝的大吗？”
4 replies on “Fable: 《上帝的铲子》God’s Shovel”
Congratulations, Kendra. You have done well here, especially in the study of the Chinese Language and the written scripts. Your Alex at Mandarinspot.com deserves a special mention in the spot translations – a very useful tool for me. My only comment, which I hope is positive, is the fact that the English translations are much too literally direct. Just as an example, the first paragraph here can easily be translated into simple English as ” A devoted Christian farmer was kind and generous to his family, friends, and neighbors. He donated to the poor and needed frequently. ” In simplifying the English, your stories will additionally attract Chinese students who are studying the English Language.
Thanks, I’m also very grateful to Alex for the cool scripts. You’re right, the translations are literal, and I struggle with the back-and-forth between making something sound better and making it literal all the time. But, in my mind, the best translation is the one best suited for the context in which it is being used. And in this case, it is being used as a tool to help readers track the meaning and their place in the sentence. Many try to match the words in the Chinese to the English, and this is harder to do if I’ve mixed the word order all around (though I still do that sometimes). And so I hope no Chinese readers are picking up English from my translations, which, because they are serving this one purpose, are pretty garbage as stand-alone texts.
A devoted Christian farmer was kind and generous to his family, friends, and neighbors. He donated to the poor and needy frequently.
His neighbors and close friends simply could not understand why he was so generous.
“Sir,” one of his friends addressed him one day, “I simply cannot understand why you give so much of your wealth away. Further, why is it that you have so much to give?”
“Well,” answered the farmer, “God is kind. God gives us our shovels and the more we shovel out the more God’s SHOVEL will be shoveling goodness into our lives. For, God’s SHOVEL has always been a lot bigger than all of our shovels combined.”
This, however, is not garbage, and is a MUCH better English standalone version. Too bad computer screens aren’t wider, we could get three versions up there.