A sweet success

Wording


This text is particularly accurate in using words. Let's take adjectives as an example.

1.□ Take a rocky road

(There is a mountain in America called the Rocky Mountains. “Rocky” is often used to describe a difficult situation. This word sums up one of the main points of the article. Therefore at the beginning of paragraph 2, it says:

“but Carpigiani’s success has not always been assured”.

“Carpigiani’s success” summarizes paragraph 1.

2.□ sweltering sight-seer

(The main reason for choosing this adjective is that ice cream is a summer product. Most of people eat ice cream when it's hottest. “Sweltering” usually describes weather and is often translated as “闷热”,But here it describes people, so it might be interpreted as “汗流浃背”)

3.□ stringent regulations

(This adjective is used to describe strict American standards. In the preceding paragraph, i.e. the 4th paragraph of the article, it stresses the strict quality control. For example, the proportion of technical personnel in the company is relatively large. And its university teaches the “nuances” of how to make ice cream. It is this strict, detailed requirement that enables the products to meet strict or stringent American standards.)

4.□ stiffer competition

(This word often goes with “competition”. Tough competition makes it hard for many companies to deal with. One of the difficulties of this company is to cope with the copycats. However, these counterfeiters have made this kind of Italian ice cream popular all over the world. The result is totally unexpected.)

5.□ swelling middle class

(This word shows that the number of the middle class is growing. It also implies that the company's potential customers are increasing. The future of this company should be bright.)

6.□ Posh Italian ice cream

(A posh restaurant, hotel, car etc is expensive and looks as if it is used or owned by rich people: Is our school a posh college?)

The rhetoric of parallelism


1. complacency had set in, complaints rose and Carpigiani’s share of world sales slipped….

(The company has a lot of difficulties at this stage. As a Chinese proverb says, “屋漏偏逢连夜雨”. The continuous juxtaposition of three sentences depicts this difficult situation. This is the so-called 行路难,a rocky road)

2. We had to relearn the importance of customer service, of quality and of being ahead of competitors with new products

( it contains three “ofs”. The company learned a lot from the difficulties. )

The rhetoric of metonymy


3. No wonder, then, that carpigiani is making money by the scoopful

(The scoop is the tool for ice-cream consumption. What the author really wants to say is that this company makes money by selling ice cream. But obviously, the sentence in the text is much better. More examples can be easily found:

Palestinian strikes and Israeli curfews are the tit for tat of a lengthening struggle that is causing economic distress on both sides of the battle lines. The pain is great but so is the determination of the adversaries to soldier on, unaware that a two-way sword takes double toll.

Try to translate it? Note that the sword here is also a tool of war.

4. Machines that minimize intervention by human hands by cleaning themselves, for example, are more expensive, but help to ensure that the ice cream they produce is safe to eat.

(Parts of the body are also often used to refer to something else. For example,

Responding to the crisis, the Foreign Secretary told the BBC in London that it is time the peace-keeping force showed its teeth

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