Student’s logic (London)

Adam is determined to be featured in my blogspot yet again and has this new contribution.

We were doing a translation.  The source text sentence says, “There was a lot more traffic in Taipei than in Singapore, but people didn’t drive as fast.”  Adam’s rendition was: “台北的车比新加坡多，因为他们开车没有新加坡的快。” which is: “Taipei has more traffic than Singapore, because they don’t drive as fast as [in] Singapore.”  

This is (a) wrong, as it’s not what the source text says, and (b) very strange logic.  

My perverse sense of humour had me collapsing in laughter as I imagined the logic of Adam’s version to be:  “There are more cars in Taipei than in Singapore, because they don’t drive as fast — therefore one sees more of them around on the road.  If they drive as fast as in Singapore, they’d be out of sight in an instant and one wouldn’t see any cars on the roads.”  Sort of makes sense too...

(See also blog entry Students’ version of Chinese, with further examples of such things.)

 (London, 2013)