[quote=“rian”]The best translation software will not solve universal errors - and even the best translators fluent in both languages cannot. I do not know who the Taiwan govt uses, but many of the transaltions to English of official documents carry consistenty the same mistakes - and Chinese, also fluent in English, claim there is no mistake when I show it to them. So every serious translation project needs a native speaker of both languages, or at least the translator is a native speaker of the target language.
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You’re not factoring in another important link in the translation food chain in Taiwanese government work: the mythical proofreader. Usually an employee of the department in question, not selected specifically for his or her English skills, the Proofreader is charged with Making Sure the Translation was Done Well. Of course, since the Proofreader is part of the department, he or she is of higher rank than a mere Translator, so he or she is under pressure to Find Something to Improve Upon, lest his or her Boss feel he or she is Not Contributing. And, we all know that Chinese know English better than native speakers. How could they not, after all that study?
Seriously, I’ve had jobs go out in perfect English and turn up later in a form so traumatized that I could hardly recognize my own work. And that’s starting with text written by me, an educated, native speaker who is an experienced translator…imagine what the Proofreader can do when turned loose on text created by any of the Very Qualified Non-Native Speaking Translators employed at Very Low Rates by various Translation Agencies around the island. The mind boggles.
I see no difficulty with a competent (read, well-educated, native English speaking, has spent some years actually acquiring Chinese, and has considerable experience in Chinese-English translation) translator turning out an accurate and stylistically acceptable translation of a Chinese original. Some of the heavier bureaucratic stuff is hard to render in a very “native-English-like” tone sometimes, but that is the mark of a really GOOD translator, as opposed to those who merely do an acceptable job.
The problem is that this kind of translator can and does command considerably higher rates per word than government agencies budget for. Therefore, the work goes to non-native speakers, who cannot write natively, are low-paid, and don’t have the time or experience to do a good job. Or it goes to an Agency, which subcontracts to a non-native speaker (I have even known cases where agencies subcontract to university students in the English department for work into English!!). But it’s funny: while most Westerners have an deep-rooted feeling that there’s “something” about being a native speaker, and for that reason would never compare their Chinese with that of an educated native speaker no matter how good it might be, many Chinese lack that kind of feeling, and feel that their perceptions about English are as strong as those of an educated native English speaker. And writing is a less forgiving medium than speech. I’ve had endless arguments on other fora about this idea, for example, when trying to tell them for the 10,000th time that the word “senior” is NOT a noun meaning someone with more seniority than you have.