Language interpretation and translation has gradually emerged both as a discipline of academic study and also as an area of vocational schooling, aiming at training and certifying future conference interpreters for ever-booming export-oriented Chinese economy over the last three decades. Various institutes and colleges of interpretation and translation have been setup in major foreign studies universities in China. For example, the prestigious Beijing Foreign Studies University has its Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, offering courses for English-Chinese translation and interpreting at master level and linguistics courses at doctorate level.

Shanghai International Studies University has also setup its own Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation, training masters in translation and interpreting.

Mandarin Popup is a Firefox adds-on that enable learners of Chinese to look up Chinese characters or words with ease. It will display a tooltip containing the Chinese character (both Simplidied and Traditional), pinyin pronunciation, and English definition of the word underneath the mouse pointer. You can also use the context menu to browse and search Chinese new words and characters.

provenTranslation.com is pleased to announce the availability of online English to Chinese Terms searching functionality. Currently, we have over 10,000 entries of English-to-Chinese glossaries ranging from business, marketing, and technology. New English <> Chinese terms or glossaries will be added on a weekly basis.

As professional Chinese translators, we understand that in translating various documents, about 70% of the time are most likely spend on finding the appropriate Chinese translation for terminologies. More technical documents means more time in looking up terms. One of the useful tools are google.com and also dict.cn, but as these are not specifically designed for English-Chinese translators, they are not particularly efficient in helping translators hunting for the right translation of the term.

Therefore, we created this English-Chinese Term search interface, not only for our internal use, but also for English <> Chinese translation community. We hope you will like it, and please tell us what you think, so that we can improve.

The second edition of “The Translation Studies Reader”, edited by Lawrence Venuti from Temple University, has been recently published. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the important developments in translation theories and studies. A historical dimension has been added to the updated version by including key pre-twentieth-century texts.

Language is a generic term referring to system of communication. And it consists of natural languages and artificial languages.  Natural languages  are systems used for communications in our society, such as Chinese, English, German, Spanish, etc. Artificial languages are man-made and are generally used for specific purposes, such as communication between human beings and computers. While converting one artificial language to another may not be difficult, translating between natural languages is no easy task at all. There’re many research in the area of machine translation. That is, use computers to translate English to Chinese, for example, automatically, and efficiently. Even though this area of study has been around for move than half a century, it’s still far from being stable. In the meantime, human translators are still the best resources that we can use in current translation business.

Ideology plays an important role in almost everything, under the socialist regime. And this surely include language translation as well.  Gaby Thomson-Wohlgemuth’s recent book “Translation Under State Control” is an excellent example of this. English to German translation of children’s literature has been greatly influenced, or controlled by the socialist regime of the former German Democratic Republic.

“Translation Goes to the Movies” is a recently published book that introduce translation theories through movies. Problems and issues of translation are revealed by examining movies such as “Lost in Translation”. This book also discussed issues such as identity, culture and representation that filmmaker needs to deal with. This is a book that is suitable for translation theory courses and film course studies as well.

Literal translation and free translation are two main methods employed by translators in conveying ideas between languages. As the name suggest, literal translation is word for word translation. For example, the movie British Patient is translated into Simplified Chinese as 英国病人, using exactly the literal style of translation. This way of translation is a generally preferred over the other style (free translation), since it’s easier for both the English to Chinese translator and also the intended audience as well.

On the other hand, compared to literal translation, free translation is much less a translation than really a recreation. The the following English-Chinese translation example:

Pursuit of Happyness  >> 当幸福来敲门

We can see that the Chinese wording are not reflected the English original titles, rather it focus more on the content of the movie. Sometimes it makes more sense to the target audience, but it might be hard for them to associate the name with the original English version, unless they watched the movie in the first place.

When it comes to buying translations online, one factor needs to be carefully considered: ONLY choose translators who translate INTO their native language. The reason behind is simple. Even though many translators are bilingual, the linguistic capability and cultural sensitivity in their first language (mother tongue) is much better than their second language. Native speaker intuition does matter in the quality of the translation. So, for example, if your documents needs to be translated into Simplified Chinese, then native Chinese speaker from mainland China should be your prime candidate. If, on the other hand, your documents need to be translated from Simplified Chinese into English, then you’ll want to work with a translator who’s native language is English.

One of the strength of the open source Internet browser FireFox is its vast pool of plugins and add-ons. There is one plugin called: Chinese Perapera-kun: Chinese Popup Translator 1.02. It allows user to read Chinese on website and it works on Simplified Chinese as well as Traditional Chinese. Another feature is that it gives you the Chinese pinyin, especially useful if you’re learning Chinese as a foreign language.