You may ask yourself, where do I start? Even if I do translate every English word to chinese, how do I make sure the sentence obeys the Chinese grammar rules? Lets discuss a quick way that many have found useful to translate your English Talk or Article into Chinese.
Step 1. Write your talk in English.
This way you make sure you add all the points you want to make and make sure its logical and coherent and teaches or conveys the ideas you wish to highlight and meets the desired goals.
A) Don’t write too much English:
Often, when you are new to Chinese, everything takes longer to say and read. Often a 5-minute English talk, might take 7 to 10 minutes to say it in Chinese, especially if you are not yet fluent. Also, make sure you don’t write too much. This will not only save you in translation time, but then you will not need to cut out some important points from your talk and rewrite the English and start over again if your way over time.
B) Write very short and simple English sentences:
The shorter the English sentence the better Chinese translation software to translate. In step 2 we will need to use Google translate to help.
C) Use existing Chinese Text
If you are creating a talk based on a book, magazine or news article, use existing phrases and sentences from these sources. If they are not already in electronic form, use a computer scanner to scan in the text. This way, you can use existing specialized words and terms that translation programs might not be able to translate properly. Use the Chinese sentences in steps 2 and 3.
Step 2. Translate English sentence into Chinese Characters
Translate each sentence one at a time to Chinese.
Open a browser window to: Google Translate and select English to Chinese-simplified or English to Chinese traditional. Paste in an English Sentence one at a time and hit translate. How do you know if it translated correctly?
We need to test the translation. Write the same English Sentence at this site Free English to Chinese Translation and compare the results. (this site gives you a direct translation and opportunity to select the correct English meaning). Also, we could reverse the process though another translation site such as Free Chinese to English Translation.
Remember with Google, the longer the sentence the more chance of an inaccurate translation. You may have to reword or reduce the sentence length at times.
Why do we even use Google translation? It’s because they do put the sentence into a somewhat grammatically correct sentence structure with proper measure words and proper placement of times/dates at the start of the sentence etc. If the sentence did not translate correctly, either rewrite the sentence or if you know the Chinese word that is not translating correctly, enter in the Chinese word directly in step 3.
Step 3. Get Pinyin and English
As mentioned in step 2, we can check the results of our English to Chinese Translation. Open a new browser window to: ThePureLanguage and enter in the Chinese characters from Google. This will not only provide you with a second check that it was translated correctly from English, but provide the important Pinyin to pronounce the Chinese characters to you’re your talk in Chinese. It has also parses the Chinese characters so they are no longer in one large block of characters, but now you know where the words start and end. With the enhanced version of the software, you can add your own words and override the Chinese.
Step 4. Get Chinese Talk Proofread
If you have a Chinese friend, you can give them your document with your translated sentences in Chinese characters for them to proof read and make edits.
Step 5. Make final Document
When the document is returned from proofreading, run the modifications through step 3. Create a formatted document with the Three Line Translation Character-Pinyin-English from the results into a document that can be read out for your talk.
Congratulations, you have just created a Chinese Talk.
I enjoy discussing current Chinese Translation tools available and how they can impact, simplify and change the way you learn Chinese.