英语俚语天天说 第27期:有其父必有其子like father, like son

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　　Then, of course, you don’t know if you should call it translation or something else, like, merely saying something in another way, albeit¹, this time in another language. Essentially², you see, that’s what translation is.

　　The Chinese expression“有其父必有其子”, for example, can be rendered into English in many ways, but seldom is a rendering³ better than the existing English expression of “like father, like son”.

　　Like father, like son, which means that a son behaves exactly like his father in some way, conveys precisely⁴ the same idea as the Chinese expression does.

　　Here is a media example in recent news.

　　Like father like son: Could a liberal Jew really consent to the circumcision of his newborn boy?

　　For Paul Sussman, the birth of his baby was both a joy and the start of a dilemma⁵.

　　For Jewish parents the world over it's a no-brainer, like the Chief Rabbi eating kosher and bears pooping in the woods – if you have a baby son, you get him circumcised. For me too, when our boy was just a dream of future fatherhood, there was no question in my mind that he would undergo the procedure, as I had done, and my father before me, and his father before him.

　　Even when Alicky, my wife, became pregnant and we saw those blurred⁶ images on the ultrasound screen, with the indeterminate grey smudge that, the scan operator assured us, was a nascent⁷ scrotum, circumcision remained a given.

　　Then, however, Ezra was born, and I held him in my arms and changed his nappy and stared at his foreskin – that tiny surge of flesh at the end of his willy – and suddenly the certainty evaporated. Could I really do this to my son? Subject him to what is, when faith and tradition are stripped away, a traumatic and, in the UK at least, medically unnecessary act.

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