Redundant twins
It is common for Chinglish to constantly use two words so close in meaning that one would do. The pairs can be nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. However, these may be redundant in English.
Example: help and assistance
Views and opinions
Sentiments and feelings
Encourage and promote
As to recognize a redundancy, a translator is faced with a question that in this particular context, is the difference important (in other words: does the second word add anything significant to the first?), instead of a question that is there a difference between these two words (since there is always a difference).
As for elimination of redundancies, the best way to deal with redundant twins is simply to delete one of them. For example, “geographical surveys and explorations” can be reduced to “geographical surveys” without loss of meaning.
At other times, it is preferable to replace both members of the pair with a new word that expresses the thought better than either of the original two. For example, “faraway, distant areas” could be described as “remote”. And instead of calling upon people to “be alert and wake up”, you could call upon them to “rouse themselves”.
Occasionally, it turns out that neither of these operations – deleting one twin or replacing both – produces an adequate version, one that covers all the sense of the original Chinese. This suggests that two or more words really are needed in English, but the translator has selected the wrong ones. The best solution in such a case may be to add a word or two that will clarify the intended meaning of one or both terms. Depending on context, of course, “conditions and environment” might be changed to “working conditions and social environment”.
取自The Translator’s Guide to Chinglish, by Joan Pinkham with the collaboration of Jiang Guihua；如有侵权，联系删除
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