Chinese stories

It’s been a little over a year since I moved to the US, and I have gradually made the transition to finding more US clients. This has been out of necessity more than anything else, as most Chinese agencies pay rates that fall below US rates, and living here can be pretty expensive, especially when you have a family. There are also hassles with how to get paid, and that come with the time differences. I still haven’t found a good way for Chinese agencies to pay me–bank transfers take a good $30-$40 and a few days to process, and that comes out of your paycheck. Paypal and other services charge ridiculous fees too. I heard the service from xe.com is worthwhile, but I haven’t been able to convince anyone to try it yet. 

But even though the rates for translation don’t usually measure up, I have found that the editing rates in China are not bad based on the amount of time it takes to do the job. The only thing is these are small projects, so the only solution is to have them put the money in a Chinese bank account in RMB. I have found that this is actually kind of useful, as many banks have online payment systems, so if I want a Chinese book off amazon.cn, I can use that RMB account and have it shipped to me in the US (i think shipping is like RMB 100 or somethiing like that, or just have a friend send it over). 

Another thing I like about working with Chinese agencies is that the PMs have knowledge of the languages I work in. In most cases PMs in the US have no knowledge of Chinese, so if I have any issues, I have to figure them out on my own. The Chinese PMs on the other hand have been very helpful, and I like being able to have someone to bounce ideas off of through MSN or Skype or whatever. They also are very helpful just as someone to be able to go to with language problems. I help them out with random questions of theirs, and if I have a weird sentence I can send it over and have them ask their colleagues about it. 

So even though it usually does not get the bills paid, I still like doing jobs for Chinese agencies, because of the other benefits that come with it.

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I had a somewhat strange request last week, as someone wanted me to translate a short sample of machine translated text without looking at the original to show a client that it really could not be used. She gave me a choice between the versions generated by babelfish and google translate to pick the one that was a better translation. They seemed to be at about the same level of gibberish, and I ended up picking the babelfish one. Just as I mentioned in my last post about having trouble with picking the right defiinition for ‘linglong’, the machines clearly have difficulty in determining which definition to choose when there are several possibilities. For example, the topic of the excerpt was chemistry, and uniform became  制服, as in a type of clothing, and thermal bonding became 熱量保稅, using the tax word for bond. Also calling a phone number became 叫, and solid (as opposed to liquid) became 堅實. The translation of ‘flux’ into 漲潮, or rising tide, was another puzzle.

It was also interesting that the paragraph section fared much worse in the machine translation than the bullets. The shorter bullet points were actually somewhat comprehensible, while the longer paragraphs became nonsensical babble. And babble is pretty hard to translate! A lot of times technical paragraphs written by engineers will be quite poorly written, but this takes it to a whole other level. The best way to translate I figured was just word-by-word, as when there is no sensical sentence structure to make out, that’s really all you can do. 

It seems to me that even though machine translation has come a long way, there are just too many variables, including non-textual ones, to consider for it to ever become 100% accurate.

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