Translation tools

Due to the need to communicate with China ppl, I've been doing the translation these days. Being the only staff who has Chinese education background, ppl have been thinking I should be good in Chinese. Well, I must say there's difference between reading/writing and translation. There's also difference between daily conversation and business writing.

When I was asked to write an email in Chinese, it really took me nearly an hour for that 423 words email. I firstly structure the sentence in English and then translate it into Chinese word by word, lastly "beautify" the sentence so that it didn't look weird. For all these years, seriously this was the first time I ever write an email in Chinese. It could be difficult as there are these technical terms I don't really know what they are in Chinese. Some sentences where it's very comprehensive in English, I have no idea how to express them in Chinese.

Reading the agreement in Chinese, most of the times I don't catch the techical terms fully. Even if I do, I would not know how to explain in English. After all my brain was not trained to use English and Chinese freely.

Compared to the translation tools available online, I found out that Ms Words has this "translation tool" where you can actually tranlsate the whole passage in just a few seconds. You do not need to pay for the service (although it mentioned you need to pay for it. As you use the tool, you will know how you can avoid paying for the services. hehe) So now a more effective way is to type email in Ms Words and use this translation tool to translate. At least it save the troubles to think what are the words to use. The translation tool might not do a very good job, as in the sentence structure could be improper, so long as you modify a bit, the whole passage is presentable still.

I hope next round they'll not expect me to speak or understand Cantonese...