Suggestions for a GOOD English to Chinese Translation Firm?

We are looking for a firm in Taipei to work with long-term. We’ve tried a local one with pretty disastrous results.

The input writing style uses a lot of subordinates, which seems to cause all sort of grammar issues with the translation. It ends up looking like something no Chinese native speaker would ever write themselves (we have native speakers at the office who could not understand the translation without having to refer back to the English version). Despite several attempted revisions, the output is not something we’d ever want to publish.

The writing also includes a lot of financial and technology jargon that has not been as much of a problem, but probably should be mentioned to delineate what I mean by a “GOOD” firm.

We’ve tried e-lance and guru with similar (and surprisingly expensive) results. Looking at maybe a semi-crowd-sourcing approach as with http://www.tolingo.com as well given their claimed multi-person proofing.

Thanks!

Quality translations require quality pay for the professionals who produce them. flob.me/p985200

[quote=“mabagal”]We are looking for a firm in Taipei to work with long-term. We’ve tried a local one with pretty disastrous results.

The input writing style uses a lot of subordinates, which seems to cause all sort of grammar issues with the translation. It ends up looking like something no Chinese native speaker would ever write themselves (we have native speakers at the office who could not understand the translation without having to refer back to the English version). Despite several attempted revisions, the output is not something we’d ever want to publish.

The writing also includes a lot of financial and technology jargon that has not been as much of a problem, but probably should be mentioned to delineate what I mean by a “GOOD” firm.

We’ve tried e-lance and guru with similar (and surprisingly expensive) results. Looking at maybe a semi-crowd-sourcing approach as with http://www.tolingo.com as well given their claimed multi-person proofing.

Thanks![/quote]

Sounds to me like the problem is with the source material and in the way it is presented. I’m guessing you sent it to a local company in an Excel spreadsheet with no glossary and no translation tools were used in the project. Hence what you got back is strings of non-contextual translation since the translator would have been working blind (and being paid NTD0.5 per word). Of course its unusable.

Do you have a reference file of previous E to C translations of similar material? If you want I can get an assessment of the feasibility of translation and/or localization of this type of material.

thanks for the quick feedback.

as a trial run we sent an entire, single article of about 1000 words. this was a introduction-of-terms and methodology type of article, so by its nature, the context was complete. the main issue wasn’t with technical correctness of the translation, it was with the style. nobody would ever write that way if they would have written the article from scratch in chinese, and my native-speaking colleagues (who are all have advanced degrees) could barely make sense of the translation given the style.

they noted that it was a technically correct translation, but had very awkward grammar structures in trying to keep true to the writing style of the english version.

imo, the terms were not so complicated as to require a glossary, and anyway, the firms never asked for them. furthermore, as i pointed out, the jargon was the not the problem. the main problem we found was the firms could not work with the open direction of keeping the core content and positions/opinions in place, but having free reign with the grammar. i assume ability to work in ambiguity is still a desired professional trait, no?

we could as a last resort translate these articles ourselves, but we feel a good professional would do a better job and furthermore would let us concentrate on what we do and let the professional translator do what they do.

thanks all. any suggestions much appreciated.

My suggestion – PM me and I’ll hook you up with a classmate of mine from grad school in Taiwan; she does all the work I refer from English into Chinese.

Pay peanuts, get monkeys; search on sites full of wannabes, and that’s what you’ll get. If you want the job done right, pay a living wage to your translator and you won’t have to deal with a lot of headaches.

Sorry the link I posted earlier was not correct.

Try wp-translation.com/.

Therein lies the problem. Chinese and English have very different writing styles.

The translator may not have been aware of the extent of freedom he was allowed. Perhaps the translator is accustomed to dealing with clients who demand fidelity (faith to the source text) to the extent that transparency (degree to which it sounds natural in the target language) is sacrificed. Or maybe he was just a crappy or inexperienced translator.

When I translate, I strive for transparency as much as I can (and this is not always possible without major adaptations, especially on the macroscopic scale such as logical flow and rhetorical style). My decisions on how much freedom I allow myself depends, in part, on the needs of the client and the purpose and audience of the final product.

But I do Chinese-to-English, not vice versa, so I can’t help you in this regard.

How much are you willing to pay? My wife is an expert who can give you what you need. Her basic minimum is (I believe) NT$7 per English word, and she’s pretty well booked solid until the autumn of this year. More technical stuff that requires research will of course cost you a lot more than that.
Shite translation is EASY to find. Good translation is expensive and difficult to find.
Really, its not about the quality of the work. Its about the amount you’re willing to pay. My wife’s clients are happy to pay her rates and she’s backed up with work. Most of them are prepared to pay, and to wait for the work, because they know from experience how difficult it is to find someone good. Those who are not? Well, they don’t really concern her. They tend to have their own criteria – which is usually “cheap and who gives a fuck how crap it is!”

thank you all so much. i will be in touch with you and/or the contacts you have provided.

i do want to mention to be clear on our intent: this is a balance of opportunity cost for us since we have several people here who have very good english and native chinese (our group is made of up primarily of native taiwanese schooled abroad) and who are obviously intimately knowledgeable in the specific concepts and jargon. i fully appreciate that you get what you pay for, but if it gets too pricey, and factoring in additional interaction time, context switching costs, etc. of outsourcing, we could conceivably give one of our folks a task to read the articles and rewrite at the opportunity cost of other more core business tasks.

sandman, thanks for the suggestion. we also have a need for speed on the initial batch and regular updates / articles we will release on a periodic basis, so it may not work. NT$7 per english word and quality to be booked solid to 8 months out - your wife is definitely a good catch! :slight_smile: figuring one can translate something like 2 1000 word articles a day (about 4 pages) - maybe i am in the wrong business! :slight_smile:

whatever firm you seek out ask about the contextual freedom given to their translator. DO NOT ever translate Chinese to English or vice versa in a “faithful” word to word translation. Your Chinese will look weird and your English will look like Engrish, guaranteed! You’d get better result with babblefish. You need someone to read over your stuff, and practically re-write the whole article based on what he or she understands. They may need to delete some stuff (as sometimes they make sense in one language but sound redundant in the other). Seems many translator in Taiwan (I mean Taiwanese who learned English here) seems to make the faithful translation mistake and what you get is Engrish.

Services like that won’t be cheap either… the guy will have to read over your article, and if they are not really understanding the technical jargon then they’d have to do research. Best if you find someone who is a good translator but also understands the type of written material you have, but sometimes it’s gonna be a give and take because people who understands Science may not understand both language enough to be effective at translating.

I gotten email from a Taiwanese translation firm that demands a LOT (like Chinese to English and back) and pays little (.5nt per character) and I wonder is it normal for firms in Taiwan to cheap out like that? The firm I am dealing with now pays like twice that and gives loads of freedom when it comes to translating.

I can help if you want but I do Chinese to English much better than the other way around since my understanding of Chinese is rather limited and my typing in Chinese is slow too.

Its pretty normal. Hence the dreadful quality of most translations. Most companies really don’t care, though – its a translation, therefore the work has been done. And it was very cheap, too!
There are more and more companies these days, though, who really DO require quality work, and more to the point, get feedback on the quality of the stuff they print, so the issue is important to them and more and more of them are realizing this. These companies tend to be willing to pay for quality and to wait, if necessary, for the right quality to come along.
My old lady has spent more than 20 years paying her dues and getting royally ripped off countless times in the process. Its only in the last 5 years or so that she’s had the luxury of picking and choosing and naming her price. Kudos to her for sticking at it – just as well its a labour of love for her. In fact, I really envy the fact that she enjoys her work so much!
Taiwanese translation companies are generally a bad move, though. They’re businesses looking for profit, and they therefore tend to err toward the cheaper end of the translator spectrum, i.e. undergrads who’ll work for pennies or mainland Chinese who’ll work for even less.

There’s a company I once worked for, who shall remain nameless. Before I came aboard, the company’s vice president, a real pompous windbag who thought his English was superb, used to translate the annual reports into English. Then I was assigned to translate them. The quality, as you could imagine, shot up dramatically. One day, the son of the company’s chairman, an ABC, came into our office, and the VP was there. The son mentioned how much better the annual reports were now that I translated, and how truly terrible the reports were before I joined the company! The VP was standing there, and heard the guy saying exactly what I wished I could say but did not dare say! And the VP couldn’t say anything; after all, he was the chairman’s son! It was a moment to relish!!

Its pretty normal. Hence the dreadful quality of most translations. Most companies really don’t care, though – its a translation, therefore the work has been done. And it was very cheap, too![/quote]
Part of it may be that they’re simply unaware of the sheer degree to which poor English can negatively reflect on a company. Chinese is a more flexible language than English, able to withstand more “abuse” of structure than English can, plus standards for precision and explicitness are simply not as high in Chinese culture as they are in English-speaking countries.

I’ve had several exchanges with clients in which I’ve pointed out errors, and the client has questioned whether it was really that big of a deal, not believing that the presence or absence of “the” or an “-s” ending makes a difference.

Client: “Singular? Plural? So what? Why do they have to know how many? It’s not important!” :astonished:
Me: “English grammar forces you to choose, and when you do, it has to be accurate; otherwise the reader will get the wrong idea. And if you use the singular with no article, in many cases it sounds like caveman-speak.”
Client: “Really???”

Giving them a short passage of your own translation into Chinese can be very instructive…at least it can be in the case of MY translations into Chinese… :smiley: Sort of gives them that “gosh this is close but it makes me feel itchy all over for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on” feeling we get when reading their stuff (on a good day).

You know third culture kids make the best translator because they’ve experienced both culture (in case you’re wondering what a third culture kid is it’s someone who was born in one country and raised in another) and can pen thoughts in both languages. By the way the only real barrier against me translating to Chinese is the writing/typing (like I said I type painfully slow) but once that’s down grammar is pretty straightforward. English on the other hand has some rather complex grammar structure. I could dictate a translation verbally in Chinese if I need to.

Well, the problem is that third-culture kids often lack a full education in one specific language, which means that their writing is not stylistically the equivalent of an educated native speaker raised in that culture. That’s the standard for translation work (at least for professionals – don’t listen to what you hear coming out of China!! :aiyo: ) It’s not the case that every third-culture kid will be a good translator (nor the reverse, of course). They do tend to make irritatingly good interpreters, where accuracy in form is not as important as accuracy in content, and there is no lasting written artefact of what was said.

I’ve lost count of the number of ABC/TBA types I’ve had issues with over the years as an editor. A lot of them lose a lot of Chinese comprehension and have no idea about new words and local usages i.e. words like 樂活 (LOHAS) go right over their heads. Plus their English is never actually perfect. Every equipment gets a free “s” etc. etc.

Well, either one will be raised completely in one culture and has a token comprehension of the other, or raised in both culture and have a decent comprehension of both. I know most Taiwanese who learned English here wouldn’t make a good translator because they have the tendency to want to translate things word for word. Same with Americans who learned Chinese in the US.

Most people anywhere wouldn’t make a good translator. I don’t think it has to do with having acquired your languages rather than growing up bilingual.

Word-for-word translation isn’t confined to people who learned a second language, and IMHO it’s easier to train someone out of word-for-word translation habits than it is to get them to acquire the finer points of a language if they already consider themselves fully fluent or (even worse) consider themselves to be native speakers of two languages but do not have perfect command of both in writing. In fact, I think that if you have an ABC who never quite picked up the finer points of usage in English, the urge to not go word-for-word is what usually produces the funnier translation efforts.

It all depends on the individual, but there is translation (or interpreting) skill and there is language competence, and they are not the same thing. I have an American friend whose Chinese is way better than mine, but I seem to get along better as an interpreter despite that, because I have the way of thinking or whatever it is that makes it easier for me.

[quote=“ironlady”]
Word-for-word translation isn’t confined to people who learned a second language, and IMHO it’s easier to train someone out of word-for-word translation habits than it is to get them to acquire the finer points of a language if they already consider themselves fully fluent or (even worse) consider themselves to be native speakers of two languages but do not have perfect command of both in writing. [/quote]

My experience as a translator and translation editor for 20 years strongly confirms Ironlady’s observation here.