yowkee essential

Sven-S. Porst: Translating

Once you know the other language sufficiently, getting the message across somehow isn’t too hard. However, getting it across with the text feeling right and belonging naturally to the other language, seems very hard to me. I certainly have great respect for translators of novels that make you not realise the novel wasn’t written in the language you’re reading it in.

It’s a piece well written by someone who really got the view, done it, ever been the bridge between 2 different culture. In my opinion, translation never as easy as it sound. You got to be very good in the target language as having the fair understanding of the source. And it ain’t enough if your target is to let the result be sound “natural”.

It’s even worse in world of Chinese, and worst in Computer field. As everybody knew, most computer terms came from English. It is obviously for IT people (programmer, sys admin…) to recognize the terms in English, even though their mother tongue isn’t English. However, there always need for translated words for ordinary people. It become a mess while there are various Chinese translations of Taiwan, China mainland, Hong Kong…(Malaysia and Singapore mostly follow but variant too occasionally). So you got to be specified in translating a English essay to Chinese encoding in Big5 (Taiwan) or GB3212 (China), there are different terms used for a single word. There are people pushing to use the original technical terms in computer books, since readers would still have to know/familiar the word, because English dominate the field at the mean time (not forsee to be changed though).