Contents
At the age of 5 she read quite well .
Recommended translation: At 5 years she was reading very well.
Mistranslated: She's known how to dance for more than five years.
With the transfer of age, many have problems. It would seem that there is nothing complicated here: we translate 5 years , we get 5 years . But this is where many people remember the school drill like I am 5 years old - I am 5 years old and begin to "sculpt" one on top of the other. So it turns out in 5 years - this is at 5 years or at 5 years old .
Firstly, it is better not to translate "years" into English at all. This is the easiest and surest way. Then you get At five she was reading very well .
If you really want to use the full phrase 5 years old , you will have to remember that it is used after the verb ( am , as in our previous example). We'll have to change the sentence a little: WHEN SHE WAS 5 years old, she read quite well.
When she was five years old, she was reading very well.
Why should we change it? Indeed, we cannot combine “at 5 years old” and “was” into a meaningful sentence. So I had to replace "in" with "when".
Examples
News headline:
- Police: Woman found 10 years after she was kidnapped at 15.
Facebook post:
- Wake Up World June 11 at 18:01. When I was 18 years old, I suffered from anxiety and stomach problems. A compassionate physician and practicing Buddhist referred me to a Taoist monk who specialized in meditation and martial arts. I ended up healing myself of anxiety and stomach issues by doing meditation, and went on a great journey of self-discovery.
I don't mind being interrupted .
Recommended translation: I don't mind being interrupted.
Mistranslated: I do not mind be interrupting.
Mind is a beautiful word, very common and easy to remember! But here's the problem - after it begins a whole song of mistakes.
Let's remember once and for all: after mind the verb comes with the ending -ing - mind doing .
Let's look at the dictionary entry on this subject from Macmillan English dictionary :
not mind doing something - to be happy or willing to do something.
- I don't mind going if no one else wants to.
Therefore, at least in this example, there should be mind being . So, that's sorted out.
Further, “I was interrupted” is clearly a passive voice, that is, the action is performed on you, in relation to you. After all, you are interrupted, and not vice versa! Let's now remember how the passive voice form is built - be + the main verb with the ending -ed . We have already dealt with be , we added the ending –ing to it . It remains only to add interrupted to interrupt . With this simple addition, we get the correct option: I do not mind being interrupted .
He is 5 years younger than his sister .
Recommended translation: He is five years younger than his sister.
Mistranslation : He is younger than his sister by five years.
Let's get back to talking about age. We have already understood for ourselves that it is not worth translating literally here - it turns out ridiculous and ridiculous. In this example, it also happened, although grammatically everything seems to be correct.
The fact is that when we say “more beautiful, better, smaller, smarter, older, younger by some”, then this is somehow put BEFORE, and not after our “more beautiful, better, smaller, smarter, older, younger ". So now let's go back to the example. How much younger are we? For 5 years. So we have a 5 year age difference. I deliberately paraphrased in the previous sentence to omit the preposition "on". This difference is put without a pretext: be it 5 years, 3 times, 15 kilometers, 2 hours, etc.
And now in order.
- We put the difference BEFORE "younger": He is by five years younger than his sister.
- We remove the preposition from this difference: He is five years younger than his sister.
Examples
Here is an example headline from the Daily Mail:
- I spent £5,000 to look 10 years younger : One woman's quest to turn back the clock on a decade of stress and hectic living.
The solution to one of the algebraic problems is as follows:
- It takes Brian 15 hours longer to build a model car than it takes John
Summary
We hope that this analysis of errors will be useful to you. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below, we will definitely help you figure it out.
