September 11th, 2009
Microsoft has released its free online translation services called the Bing Translator. It offers automatic translation across fifteen languages, including English to Chinese translation and vice versa. The machine translation quality, however, can not be compared with professional translator.
In a test of the following sentence:
克林顿的演讲受到了广泛的关注。
The translation produced by the Bing Translator is:
Clinton’s speech was subjected to widespread concern.
Obviously, the quality of the Bing translator is not so good as human English Chinese translator. A better version would be:
Clinton’s speech has received widespread attention.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
August 28th, 2009
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve upgraded our wordpress powered translation blog, yet again. It now runs much faster and of course, more stable and secure.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 5th, 2009
There are primarily two ways to translate an English movie name into Chinese: literal translation and free translation. Literal translation, as the name suggest, is word for word translation from English into Chinese. For example: British Patient is translated as 英国病人, and 手机 is translated into Cell Phone. This is a generally preferred way of translation, since it’s easy to translate and also understood by the audience.
Free translation is much less a translation than a recreation. The Chinese wording are not generally reflected the English original titles, but focus more on the content of the movie. For example, The Pursuit of Happyness is translated as 当幸福来敲门 and Steal Happiness is translated as 没事偷着乐。
Posted in Translation Studies | No Comments »
January 11th, 2009
The global economic crisis has big influence on almost every nation. Obviously, China is no exception. The export sector has been hit hardest. Naturally, this including translation services provided too. For the past several month, my translation business has almost stopped. If people are not buying goods/equipments, why should they need translation services?
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
December 19th, 2008
IT 方面的术语比较多，有些往往很难翻译，但有些最好还是保留英文，不要翻译。不然，不仅让读者看不懂，而且有的会很搞笑，比如：
C++: 希加加
C: 希
php：皮和皮
.net:点奈特
fireworks：焰火
Flash：闪耀
Dreamweaver：编梦工
Linux：丽纳斯
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
December 19th, 2008
There’s no Chinese translation there for Linux. But still, many are asking for it repeatly on various BBS. And I came across such tempted translation today on SMTH.ORG:
GNU/Linux
格怒 斯拉希 利呐克斯
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
December 18th, 2008
Yeeyan.com, as I have blogged about in Yeeyan: A Social Translation Website, is a web 2.0 website that leverage communities’ power to translate English articles into Simplified Chinese. It is said that it has attracted more than 50,000 users to date and received about 50 to 100 submission of translated artices everyday. One of the many features of yeeyan is that it can present the original English and translated Chinese to be listed side-by-side. The following is a screenshot:
Yeeyan Bilingual Presentation
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 20th, 2008
Patents offer protection over innovation. If you want to be proteced for your innovative technologies in China, you need also file your application in China (probably through PCT). But the language stated need to be in the local language, in this case Simplified Chinese. A good English to Chinese translator can help you convert your original version into the target language. Machine translation will certainly got you no where. Don’t even think about it.
Tags: patents
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 2nd, 2008
I’ll start a series of posts on learning Chinese. Chinese is a beautiful language and it has the most speakers, about 1.17 billion, that’s about one-fifth of the world population.
Originally, its the indigenous language spoken by the Han Chinese in China. It belongs to Sino-Tibetan family of languages. In China, there are many dialects of Chinese (controversies exist regarding the distinction between languages and dialects).
Tags: Learning Chinese
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 1st, 2008
Like many of us, if you’re using FireFox browser to explore the Internet, especially if you’re frequently looking for information from webpages other than your competent languages, there is pleasant surprise from the FireFox community: gTranslate add-on.
With gTranslate, all you need to do is just by selecting and right-clicking over the text, and you’ll get you the translation of any text in a webpage. Of course, the translation is not performed by FireFox. It makes use of Google translation services, but it is not affliated with Google. Image titles and alt attribute can also be translated too. Chinese-English and English-Chinese translations, including both Simplified and Traditional Chinese are supported.
With open source software, things like this are plenty. It just makes our lives easier.
Tags: Google Translation Services
Posted in Machine Translation, Uncategorized | No Comments »