Authors
We are a couple of professional Chinese translation consultant. We were born and raised in China. Between the two of us, we have a combined 20+ years of Chinese translation experiences. We are pursuing our Ph.D. degrees in Applied Linguistics at leading Chinese and American Universities. In this blog, we share useful Chinese translation resources, tips, and insights. We also analyze some poor Chinese translations from a linguistic perspective
Author Archives: Haiyang Ai
Find trusted local services on Thumbtack
Thumbtack is a service that is dedicated to provide information for local services. It seeks to explore new ways to make buying and selling services easier for people. For instance, if you’re expanding your business to the China marketplace, you … Continue reading
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Quality, Human English-Chinese Translations
It is probably a truism to say that the best quality of English to Chinese translations that electronic devices could provide is still far from the quality of professional human English to Chinese translators. However, companies like to use phrases … Continue reading
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Metaphors in English to Chinese Translation
In capturing the surprisingly fast emergence of something, Chinese and English languages possess different metaphors based on their respective culture. In Chinese, it could be expressed in “如雨后春笋般涌现” （emerge as bamboo shoots after rain in spring）, while in English, the … Continue reading
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Translator and Interpreter: A Day in the Life
Do you know what a TRANSLATOR is? What about INTERPRETER? What does it mean to be a translator or interpreter? See the video below for a day in the life (Courtesy of American Translators Association).
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English to Chinese Translator: HE Xilin
As the first official English to Chinese translator employed by the Communist Party of China (CPC) to translate Marxist writings, HE Xilin (together with his team’s Chinese translators) have translated the writings by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and volumes of … Continue reading
Translational Chinese: The pursuit of a third-code
Translational Chinese, or any other language used as target language in translation, is different from the source language as well as the target language. This special variety has been termed “the third code” by Frawley (1984). In corpus-based a study … Continue reading
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Chinese to English Translator: Yang Yixian
YANG Xianyi (1915-2009) was a titan in classic Chinese to English translation. Yang studied at Oxford and has met his wife Gladys Taylor, with whom he later translated numerous classic works of Chinese literature. Their translations included Selected Works of … Continue reading
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Chinese to English translator: Slip Carefully?
This post continues our analysis on the Chinese to English translation of sign posts. The case in point today is “Slip Carefully”, as can be seen on this Chinese-English bilingual sign post. I don’t know what’s your first reaction when … Continue reading
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Tip for English to Chinese translator: Translating Metaphorically
One difficult challenge that many English to Chinese translators encounter is the translation of words that are used not exactly literally, but rather metonymically or metaphorically. Such creative use of language, perhaps not surprisingly, is often not indexed or documented … Continue reading
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Translating English verbs as Chinese nouns
As translators, we frequently encounter the selection of words, especially words in certain grammatical categories when translate one language into another. Such selection can be difficult, when its equivalent do not offer much choice in the target language. For example, … Continue reading
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