About English to Chinese Translation

Performing English to Chinese Translation is not a case of substituting A for B and deciphering a cryptogram. The Western and Eastern mindsets are different when it comes to language. More accurately, one disassembles logograms and recombines their meaning as ideograms: words become pictures.

The first victims of translation from English to Chinese are verb tenses and English grammar. There is no past or future tense in Chinese; instead, there is a change of state from before and a will to act later. This paradigm moves away from focusing on a timeline and towards relationships between actors and actions. Naturally it can improve storytelling as ‘When?’ ceases to be so important. Many of our nouns (including proper names) have no meaningful basis in their etymology. When translating into Chinese, they suddenly gain intrinsic meaning. Chinese words are, after all, assemblages of meaningful bits. For example, “sled” becomes “snow car” and “Santa Claus” may become the “Christmas Old Guy.” Some names might have to be transliterated (written using words that sound similar), but as erstwhile syllables Chinese names are rich in description. “Mary” could transliterate to “Mei Li” which means “Beautiful Pretty” in its most common Chinese form. English sentiments are written using exactly as many words as it takes to convey meaning. Chinese favor a balance in writing – balance of sound and syllable count and tone. When every word is paired up, a kind of poetry can be derived from what is in its Western form mundane. “What do you want me to say?” becomes “You want me to say what?” in Chinese thought. The only visible difference is 6 syllables instead of 7, but this is pleasing aesthetically to the Eastern ear. One common misconception about Chinese is that it is read from right-to-left, top-down. This is only true in newspapers, and then only when space and style demand. When performing English to Chinese translation, one should maintain the English orientation of left-to-right and also maintain similar paragraph breaks. In addition, some things may be left in English, such as unique names or the year number. For example, “John Green” has an obvious transliteration (and translation of “green”), but “Britney Spears” will not sound smooth (or feminine as “spears”).

The best advice when undertaking to translate content from English to Chinese is to review many pieces that were translated from Chinese to English. Hopefully the intermediate stage can be observed: namely, the rearranged stage which crosses the bridge between Western and Eastern grammars. On that bridge are magic and poetry, waiting to be carried to the other side.