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Mini-contest 2012: "Yogi Berra Quotes" » English to Chinese

Competition in this pair is now closed, and the winning entry has been announced.

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Source text in English

- "I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous."

- "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

- "You can observe a lot just by watchin'."

- "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

- "I can't concentrate when I'm thinking."

- "The future ain't what it used to be."

- "I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did."

- "We're lost, but we're making good time."

- "Half the lies they tell about me aren't true."

- "A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore."

- "It's like deja-vu, all over again."

- "It ain't over till it's over."

- Mrs. Lindsay: "You certainly look cool." Yogi Berra: "Thanks, you don't look so hot yourself."

- "If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be."

There were 8 entries submitted in this pair during the submission phase.

Entries submitted in this pair were rated on a per-segment basis. Listed below are all submitted translations of each individual source text segment.

Submitted segment translations

Translations submitted for each source text segment are listed below. Segments have had surrounding punctuation stripped, and the resulting identical segments have been grouped together, so each listed translation should differ, but the difference may be subtle (eg. internal punctuation or diacritics).

Viewing segment # out of 14

Source text segment #3

- "You can observe a lot just by watchin'."
Rank by:
+24 | -2
The usual saying is "you can learn a lot just by watching". This version simply says that you see things if you watch them.
+18 | -4
Trying to offer a profound piece of advice when in fact saying nothing is what makes this Yogi Berra quote humorous.
+12
That nice little apostrophe in "watchin'" - "You watchin' me, son?"; "Whatcha watchin'?" - lends a lovely dichotomy to the more professorial "observe". The quote's educational message is charmingly phrased. Don't know if Yogi really considered this, I
+5
This is the advising communication style, in contrast with the critical "Pay attention!". A close alternative could be "You can hear a lot by just listenin'." A more distant one could be "It pays off to pay attention".
+6 | -1
Want to know what's going on around you. Well just look around you
+4 | -2
I'm sure there's a technical term but it's just "logical obviousness" using synonymy (given that "observe" and "watch" are pretty much the same). It's obvious you can observe a lot just by watching.
+1
Just by evaluating these various segments, I'm beginning to realize how destabilizing this segment actually is: did Yogi mean a lot of observation (the action) or the many outcomes of one observation? AAAAAAAAAhhhh, philosophical questionings......!!!
You learn from the mistakes of others. Можно учиться на чужих ошибках.
+2 | -2
They say that this phrase was yelled to players in the dugout annoyingly not paying attention to the game. In a different book, Yogi says he gave that answer to reporters when asked if he could coach.
Sometimes multi-tasking limits our observations, one c
-2
observar is ver with intention. Ver is just to see, what happens when you open your eyes, very different to observe

Translations of this segment (8 total; 8 unique)

閉嘴看的也能吸收很多
观看是观察的好办法
你只是旁观，却知道所有的事
你只要睁着眼就能观察到不少
光是觀察你就可以看出很多端倪
静观其详，出口成章
你就是光看看，都能看出不少名堂来
用你的双眼观察，你会学到很多
Viewing segment # out of 14