Jianjun's Blog

It’s been about a half a month since my last article was published here. While busying myself with some new projects, I have also been collecting materials for writing this article concerning bad translations and the resulting high costs a client must pay for a wrong decision.

Oftentimes, wrong decisions come from common myths about using a translation service. ATA (American Translators Association) provides a very good, yet easy to read, booklet educating clients what translation is all about. Here’s the link to the PDF file: http://www.atanet.org/docs/Getting_it_right.pdf

O.K. Let me have your attention again please. It’s not difficult to find bad translations popping up around us. In my article , let me only concentrate on Chinese translations.

I found this translation on one website (when you are invited by someone to join it, you’ll see this page):

Only six degrees separate all the people in the world.
The corresponding Chinese was rendered as:

最多通过六个人的介绍，您就可以认识世界上任何一个人。

Back-translation:
Through the introduction of at most six people, you can know anyone in the world.

Imagine a visitor who is invited by a colleague, clicks on a link and lands on a page saying this! My own feeling is that I am encouraged to get up to six invitations so I can know anybody in the world. But how? Is it logical? I was already a member when I saw this. I guessed it talked about the six degrees of connections we could make at the site. The English and French versions proved that. But it could be misleading to a newcomer who isn’t familiar with this mechanism of the website.

It is not that Chinese doesn’t have a way to express the exact idea of “degree”, which in this sense could be rendered as “层” or “级”。Of course, the Chinese language structure can be very different from that of western languages. But as long as we keep the original meaning, tone and style, structure can be a second consideration.

My attempt: 只需六层联系人（six degrees of contacts），您即可遍识天下英才。

This one instance won’t hurt a business much. But bad translations on Skype is probably a different story. It is my observation that Skype is not popular in China. I don’t know if this is directly caused by its not-so-user-friendly Chinese interface, but this surely contributes to its unpopularity. A few months ago, when I was using an older version of Skype, I even found a typo there in its Chinese translation. Now the typo is gone, but bad translations are still there. (Skype [Beta] Version 2.5.0.91 and earlier)

Let’s look at one of them:

English Version:
View –> Hide Contacts That Are –> Not Sharing Details

SC Version:
视图 –> 不显示 –> 未验证通过我的请求的联系人

“Not sharing details” was translated as “未验证通过我的请求的联系人”, which is very ambiguous and could be interpreted as “Contacts that passed my request unverified” or “Contacts that passed my request are not verified”. But the problem is neither of them are correct. It’s simply “Not sharing details” or “未分享详细信息”. The TC (Traditional Chinese) translation is “不分享個人資訊” or “Not Sharing Personal Information”, which is also good.

If you care to spend a little more time on Skype, you will find many other inappropriate SC translations that defy a user’s efforts to enjoy it – fragments of untranslated English words mixed with Chinese, stiff and alien sentences that you have to read several times before getting its meaning, etc.

PayPal is popular in many parts of the world. But its localized Chinese version “贝宝” has language problems. In an unofficial Powwow held in Beijing last may, a project manager of a Beijing-based translation company revealed to us that he got the bid for the localization of PayPal China (www.paypal.com.cn, whose services are limited to the Chinese market. These accounts can’t send or receive money outside mainland China). When the website was launched last year, I was disappointed at its unnatural and unwieldy Chinese interface. I experienced this browsing through most parts of the site where it was localized. In some cases, I have to read twice or thrice to understand a sentence. As I do not need its service (limited to China) and do not like the Chinese language style it used, I stay away from it.

One interesting thing happened to me a few days ago. I tried to purchase some Skype credit using PayPal and was redirected to a Chinese language page:

贝宝可以安全地处理您的 商家的付款，Skype. 如想继续，请在下方输入必要信息。了解有关贝宝的详情。
Back-translation:
PayPal can securely process your   merchant’s payment, Skype. If you want to continue, please enter necessary information below. Learn details of PayPal.

I tried many times to get to its English page but failed. So I can’t provide a comparison here. However, the sentence is obviously awkward. Skype, apparently the merchant’s name, didn’t appear at the proper place. And there is a redundant space in the first part of the sentence. If this is not bad translation, it shows bad QA.

For software and website localization efforts, where we have to translate out-of-context segments in the first stage, a UI Review is indispensable to ensure quality. When the translation process is over, proofreading begins. Then the target language text is integrated into the software/website by the client’s engineering team. After that, the translation service provider begins a UI Review to ensure everything works well. If the service providers had a QA process where this Review was responsibly conducted, the above stories should not have occurred.

In many cases, clients simply hired those “low-cost” services at the expense of losing market share. A good language interface not only gives users easy access to functionality, but also gives users due respect! If you decide to speak their language, speak well.

This article summarizes the differences between two distinctive Chinese writing systems, i.e. Traditional Chinese (TC) and Simplified Chinese (SC).

First, please tell me some general information about Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.

At present, there are two distinctive Chinese writing systems coexistent in the world – Traditional Chinese (TC) and Simplified Chinese (SC). SC was actually simplified from the TC using a methodology that tries to maintain the basic features of Chinese characters while making it less complicated and easier to learn. As one of the countries that had the biggest illiterate population, the Chinese government thought, through simplifying the writing system and thus making it easier to write, more Chinese would be able to access education. But this simplification is based upon rather regular rules, and a large number of characters were not changed at all.

But how different are TC and SC? For example, can a person from Taiwan* or other TC areas read and understand an article written in SC and a person from Mainland China vice versa?

Generally speaking, people in Taiwan or other TC using areas would be able to understand articles written in SC. When reading, he/she should find some familiar but “new” characters intermixed with TC ones. Through context and good guesses, he/she would finally be able to understand the article. For a person from Mainland China, the experience could be very different.

Before we learn more about this, a little history would be helpful. The truth is, before the 1960s, mainland China used TC instead of SC. Books were printed in TC, and people were taught to use TC in schools as well. From the 1960s to 1970s, TC was still used in some places, and some books were printed in TC. Therefore, older people in Mainland China do have an advantage in reading and understanding TC.

However, the problem does not stop here. It is the dialectal uses, rather than character differences, that make TC and SC really different. For example, if we want to translate:

Through cooperation, we may acquire more useful information from the market.
TC would be: 透過合作，我們可能從市場獲得更有用的訊息。
SC would be: 通过合作，我们可能从市场获得更有用的信息。

If you observe carefully, you will find that of the nineteen Chinese characters, twelve are the same. This may help illustrate differences between SC and TC characters. Besides this differences, the words in bold were different dialectal translations.

If a translator only knows how to use TC or SC characters, but is not familiar with those dialectal uses. The translation would be unnatural and may sound strange in some cases.

O.K. Now I know the basics, but please show me something really useful when making wise choices: When should I use TC or SC?

To put it simply, if you want your article to be read and understood in Mainland China and Singapore, you would choose SC. If you stress a readership in Taiwan, Macao and Hongkong, you would opt for TC. TC is also widely used by Chinese people living in Southeast Asian countries, USA and some European countries. If you want to specifically target a readership in Hong Kong or Macao, you should also be careful that their dialect is not the same with that of Taiwan.

How to choose a translator?

Ideally, you would consider hiring a translator from Taiwan for mandarin (non-dialectal) TC translations, a translator from Hong Kong or Macao for specifically targetted TC markets and a translator from Mainland China or Singapore for simplified Chinese translations.

But sometimes, when a native TC or SC translator is not available to you (a number of factors including pricing, location, etc), you may consider using, for example, a Taiwanese, Hong Kong or Macao, etc translator for SC translation, and a Mainland China or Singaporean, etc translator for TC translation, etc. provided he/she is experienced in the target system.

The fact is, almost all professional (full-time, experienced freelance) translators do both translations in the market. Anyway, the differences between the two systems (from dialectal point of view) are probably no bigger than those of the American English and British English.

*This article lists some major Chinese speaking countries and areas only. Obviously, in an article of this scale, it is impossible to list all the countries/areas that use TC and/or SC.

It is NOT the author’s intention to say only translators living in the countries/areas mentioned have necessary skills and/or resources to do TC or SC translations.