Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Translation Job

I've started translating Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action into Simplified Chinese since this month. It's a contract with Turing Book Company, Posts and Telecommunications Press. The book is more than 500 pages, and I'm going to finish it in 4 months, with my partner Junyu Wang.

I've finished first two chapters of the book in 2 weeks, and start feeling that the job is quite interesting. At first, I've found some phrases and clauses hard to translate, and asked the translation support group for help, or just try to see what Google Translate might offer me. Then, I started getting used to those phrases and knowing how to break down complex clauses. Google Translate did offer me a lot, more than translation results. It lets you know how to write translated sentences more like natural Chinese sentences.

The side effect of doing translation job is that, after reading every perfect phrase or complex clause in English, I would try to think about how to translate it, totally naturally, even if I have no intention to translate it. When I'm reading a book in English, I'll keep trying analysing what I've read, just like a parser, and this makes me feel weird.

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