Chinese Translator's Blog

For English to Chinese Translators, online resources could be a powerful tool to ease the process of translation and guarantee high quality of translation. In the previous blog, we introduced several online dictionaries, and the present blog briefly introduces several good search engines and their application in English to Chinese translation. First of all, the reliable and useful search engines proven to be very helpful in translation are:

• www.google.com Renowned for its fast speed, high accuracy, Google search engine has become the world leading search engine.
•  www.yahoo.com Yahoo is one of the earliest search engines and possesses a great amount of academic resources.
• www.baidu.com As the Chinese version of Google, Baidu is very popular in Chinese and English translators.

These search engines could be made use of in translation in several ways. Above all, we can refer to others’ translation of terms released online. For instance, if we do not know how to translate “计划生育”into English, but it’s not hard for us to guess that it must be related to birth. Then, we could type the Chinese term and “plan” into the search engine. Guess what, the correct translation, “family planning”, is just a click away! Moreover, we could use these search engines to find modules for certain types of files, such as bidding documents. With standard sentential structures and terms, these modules could largely ease our translation and guarantee the quality of translation. Lastly, it is not uncommon to encounter cultural background that we are unfamiliar with. In this way, we could check out the essential background information by typing keywords into search engines.

However, cautions could be taken while referring to the translation on the Internet, because the online resources released are not always correct. To find high quality and correct translation, we need to evaluate the reliability of the resources. Here are a few tips: .org websites are usually more reliable than .com websites; big company websites are more trustworthy than small ones; official websites are more accurate than personal blogs; websites with high page-rank are most often reliable. However, these tips are not suitable for all case, and we translators need to use our intelligence and good sense.

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 in most English to Chinese dictionaries. Let’s take a look at the following example:

• It is all very well, again, to have a tiger in the tank, but to have one in the driver’s seat is another matter altogether.
• 当然油箱里装满优质汽油倒是好事，但是驾驶室里要是坐着横冲直撞的司机就完全是另一回事了。

In the above example, “tiger” was translated very differently from its literal or dictionary meaning of “老虎” in Simplified Chinese. The first instance of “tiger” refers to “premium gasoline” while the latter implies “reckless driver”, both of which don’t mean the carnivorous animal, but certain (interestingly, both desirable and undesirable) quality or character of tiger. Thus, good English to Chinese translation of such sentences need the translator to carefully assess not only its literal meaning but more importantly, its metaphorical extensions, by examining the context meticulously.

In the above example, the two instances of “tiger” are used very creatively, and represents semantic mappings across domains. Such creative use of language is ubiquitous, and poses a huge challenge to translators. However, quality translation of this kind can only be achieved by human translators. Machine translations, such as Google Translate or Microsoft Translator, rely on statistical data mining, and in term always relied on (quality) human existing translation, and obviously lack creativity and can’t handle situations that goes beyond searching and matching.

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, many English verbs are derived from their respective nouns. The verb “characterize” is derived from “character”. It’s easy to translate “character”, but not so easy to translate “characterize” (please let me know if you have a good translation for it). We illustrate this with the following English to Chinese translation sample:

Formality has always characterized their relationship.
他们之间的关系，有一个特点，就是以礼相待。

As you see, here the verb “characterized” is translated as its noun form “character”, or “特点” in Chinese.  This make makes the translated sentence much more readable, and natural.  Fellow English to Chinese translator, I hope you’ll find this tip useful. Please don’t hesitate to share yours.