介绍:
Xiaohua: Hello and welcome to Roundtable’s Word of the Week. This week we’re going to talk about some renting-related phrases, ’cause you know, whenever you go to another country, renting is usually the first or second step you’re going to run into.
Mark: Well, that’s right. Actually, the very word renting may have a different use in some countries and others. This is one where there’re a lot of differences in American English and British English. I know we’re talking about home rental here. But if you were going to rent a car in Britain, we would say hire a car. But it’s different with a flat, or should I say apartment. Yes, there we do share the word, and it’s rental.
Xiaohua: Exactly. 说到rental，租房有很多词汇是大家需要知道的。And one of the first words, I guess, is landlord. This sounds like a really grand word, but here it means a different thing.
Mark: Well, actually, it does mean essentially the same thing. If we take a look at the history of the word, it’s clear what it means, a lord. That’s actually a member of the nobility who owned land, a land-owning class. But even today, if you rent an apartment from a landlord, the chances are that they do own the property and the land that it’s sitting on. So they are their own sort of lord of their own piece of land, but much smaller than owning a massive amount of land, like a real lord would have done in the past.
Xiaohua: Landlord是地主，但在租房这一领域，landlord就是房东了。
Mark: Yes. And there’s also landlady as well. But that’s mainly used in the context of a bed and breakfast, or known as a boarding house, like a small-scale hotel, run by a woman. She would be called the landlady.
Xiaohua: Alright. And then we come to “flat”.
Mark: Yes, in Britain, we call an apartment a flat. Although, actually, the funny thing is that in Britain, we would refer to a self-contained dwelling unit as a flat. But the thing is though, that high-end estate agents, or realtors as Americans call them, or real estate agents, they’ll advertise a flat as an apartment to make it sound more high-end. For example, if you ever hear of a royal report about the royal family in Britain, they’ll always refer to “the royal apartment”, or “the prince stayed in the royal apartment”. They’ll never say the royal flat, but it’s exactly the same thing.
Xiaohua: I see. 虽然说flat在英式英语里是指公寓的意思，但有时候地产商在给高级公寓打广告时反而会用美语里的apartment这个词，让它显得更高大上一些。 And there’s another phrase that I don’t quite get. When you see renting classified in newspapers, sometimes they’ll say “professionals only”. What does that mean?
Mark: Well, it means that they want to have people who are getting a regular income in a regular sort of job. It’s more of what they don’t want, rather than what they do want. “Professional” can really mean just about anything. But basically what they mean is, they don’t want people who are unemployed. That’s why they’re saying that. And they don’t want students, because they might wreck the apartment.
Xiaohua: Oh, that’s a little bit harsh. 当你在英国的房屋出租广告上看到professionals only的时候，意思是说他们只想要有工作的人，也就是能长期负担房租的人作为他们的租客。所以学生和无业人员都是不会被考虑的，因为他们不是professionals。
Mark: One of the most important things to think about when renting a place is how much it’s going to cost you. And you might find that when you go to the landlord, or to the letting agent, that’s the person that acts on the landlord’s behalf, if they’re not around for some reason, then they might ask you for a deposit in advance, and a month’s rent as a deposit. So you’re going to have to pay two months’ rent upfront or to begin with. One of those lots of rent will be kept throughout the time you’re at the flat. If you leave and make a mess in there, then you might not get all or some of that deposit money back at the end.
Xiaohua: 在租房之前一定要交订金，deposit，也叫damage deposit。意思是说在房屋租期满了之后，如果你不把房间收拾干净，那你的订金就拿不回来了。And that’s all we have for this week’s Word of the Week.
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