请教“华邮报告书”中的一句英文翻译 英文翻译, country, 报告书, China

butterfly

今翻阅绵嘉义“华邮报告书”第一页，其中有一句英文的意思不甚明了，特向各位前辈请益学习。

原文为“华邮报告书”序言第三段第一句：

Although China stands as one of the Benjamins in the Postal brotherhood as a postage stamp issuing country.

红字部分的意思不清楚，盼指教。谢谢。

下面是原文附图。

张冬冬

中文版的华邮报告书中的翻译

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2016-5-20 14:25

butterfly

中文版的华邮报告书中的翻译
张冬冬 发表于 2016-5-20 14:26

谢谢张先生，我也看到该译文，但感觉翻译不是很准确，因为我国加入万国邮联是1914年的事情，绵嘉义写此文是，我国还不是邮联成员。孙君毅的翻译也不是很准确。
关键是Benjamins不知道在这里到底是什么意思？

butterfly

继续请教

butterfly

Many thanks for wlin98004's help.  wlin98004 is a member of CSS.

To translate this, you need to know a bit about American history. Benjamin Franklin is one of the founding father of the US. When we referring to Benjamins of something, it is mostly referring to as founder of something. This is not common used and very few people outside of US really understand it.

In the context of the Chinese postal system, I am not even sure we can call China as one of the first issuer of postage stamps. The first large dragon came out in 1878 which is 48 years later than the penny black. I read the entire paragraph, it took me a few reads before I understand the meaning of the paragraph. The writing is pretty poor in today's standard. In this case, you can't take literal translation of every word and phrase. You basically have to understand its meaning and re-write it in Chinese. My Chinese is pretty poor, so I will try my best. Here is my attempt.

中国是一个较早的邮票发行国家， 但它的邮政系统远早于此。史记上有记录在两千年前中国已有一个广阔和有系统的传递系统。

I don't see how this first sentence is connected with the discussion in the rest of the paragraph.