21 May 2022

Mr Lawrence Leung, Senior Lecturer of the School of Translation and Foreign Languages, delivered on 21 May 2022 a public lecture entitled ‘Found in Translation: Common Mistakes in English Usage’, the second public lecture on common mistakes in language use in Hong Kong hosted by the School.

Translation in Hong Kong mainly involves Chinese and English. Mistakes in English usage in translation often occur in our daily life. Mr Leung introduced different kinds of mistakes in English usage, focusing on grammatical ones.

Mr Leung compared Traditional Grammar and Systemic Functional Grammar with examples,  explaining that a word might be polysemous and can serve different functions. He then demonstrated how to deal with English articles in translation and analysed the structures of different English tenses. Mr Leung concluded the talk by encouraging the audience to pay attention to the differences between Chinese and English grammar in order to avoid making mistakes during translation.