实行24 小时工作制。车队利用夜间进行运输，及时为卡车卸货，保证在18个小时内完成整个运输过程。
I think it must be ‘把’
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As a native Chinese speaker, actually you could of course replace "为" with "把"、“给”、“帮” here. The sentence would also make sense then!– user2049259Commented Feb 8, 2015 at 3:45
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2 Answers
为 means "for", as most people know. In this case, "for" is used as in "unload the cargo for the truck". This usage is slightly less orthodox, but still makes quite some sense if you take it as a personification, treating the truck as if it has a mind, but cannot unload the cargo by itself, so you need to unload the cargo for it. This usage appears because everyone handles objects in their mind differently, and there are people who are used to this sort of personification, as demonstrated when someone consoles an object if the object falls from their hands or a table (mostly kids as adults don't express their thoughts as much. I cannot be sure, but this may be related to empathy). This kind of usage is further proliferated by human interactions in the society, where people tend to be affected and pick up others' language usage patterns.
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yup. It may conceptually be slightly weird, but again, people aren't robots.;) Commented Jan 31, 2015 at 15:51
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1I agree with this answer but I don't think doing something for some object is personification or metaphorical. You can buy flowers for a room, make cover for a book, unload cargo for a truck. Not being idiomatic or correct in English language does not mean they are illogical to say in any language.– NS.X.Commented Jan 31, 2015 at 20:56
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@NS.X you actually can't unload cargo "for" a truck in English, it makes no sense to us (the other two usages are correct) because the cargo isn't part of the truck once unloaded, unlike the first two cases. Just out of curiosity- does the usage in the truck case not seem a bit strange for native chinese speakers? Commented Jan 31, 2015 at 21:56
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@MasterSparkles It's not strange at all - it's the right usage. Colloquial version is 给 (给卡车卸货). If 'unloading cargo for a truck' doesn't make sense in English then I can't think of any analogy to English to help explain this, but it makes perfect sense in Chinese. Doing something for some object does not require the 'thing' to be a part of the object.– NS.X.Commented Feb 1, 2015 at 2:03
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How interesting! 給 makes more slightly more intuitive sense to me... Thanks for the clarification. Commented Feb 1, 2015 at 2:52
I don't want to make you Chinese people blush, but I have often found that the logic of Chinese is more penetrating than English. In this particular case, in English we simply say 'unload the truck', which is actually ambivalent, albeit easily understood within the context of a given situation. If the truck were the cargo, we could also say the same.
Chinese has 为卡车卸货 for at least 2 reasons. 1 is to passivize, because the truck is not doing anything, 2 is to indicate the fact goods are taken from the truck, not the truck as cargo is unloaded from another vehicle.
To say here '为‘ is 'for' is not correct, in my opinion.