chenshujian Diglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5449 days ago 122 posts - 139 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: French
| Message 1 of 3 03 March 2010 at 1:42pm | IP Logged |
I work as a translator in a construction company.
And I have to translate a lot English construction documents into Chinese.
The sentences are usually lengthy and complicated.The wordings are difficult.
This makes my work a little painful.
Who can give me some advice on this problem?Thanks
PS:my company is specialized in constructing breakwaters.
So the documents are mainly about breakwaters.
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5380 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 2 of 3 03 March 2010 at 2:02pm | IP Logged |
I work as a legislative translator, from English to French. Though these two languages
are certainly a lot closer to eachother, I definitely get my share of lengthy,
complicated sentences.
What exactly is the biggest problem you have? Understanding the English, or writing the
Chinese?
In the first case, you might actually be dealing with texts that aren't well written,
which there isn't much you can do about, other than consult the author if possible.
As for the latter, concentrate on the meaningful parts of the English and make sure
that they are all clearly exposed in the Chinese -- never mind the lengthy English
sentences, render it whichever way feel most natural to you in Chinese.
But perhaps you already know all these things...
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Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6767 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek
| Message 3 of 3 03 March 2010 at 11:12pm | IP Logged |
It's the same translating Japanese technical documents into English.
Basically, you need to practice reading more. Enough so, so that when you read a long and complicated English
sentence, you can understand it in its entirety and "hold" the meaning in your head for conversion into natural
Chinese. The last thing you want to do is to "translate as you go", i.e. translate word-for-word, since that tends to
produce awkward, if not incomprehensible, results. However, for very tricky sentences I have found that sometimes
translating in segments gives me a better idea of the overall meaning.
Sometimes you can pick out the main structure of the sentence and translate that first before filling in tricky noun
phrases, adverbial phrases, etc.
Edited by Captain Haddock on 03 March 2010 at 11:13pm
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