Haiyang’s Blog

IT 方面的术语比较多，有些往往很难翻译，但有些最好还是保留英文，不要翻译。不然，不仅让读者看不懂，而且有的会很搞笑，比如：

C++: 希加加
C:   希
php：皮和皮
.net:点奈特
fireworks：焰火
Flash：闪耀
Dreamweaver：编梦工
Linux：丽纳斯

There’s no Chinese translation there for Linux. But still, many are asking for it repeatly on various BBS. And I came across such tempted translation today on SMTH.ORG:

GNU/Linux

格怒 斯拉希 利呐克斯

Yeeyan.com, as I have blogged about in Yeeyan: A Social Translation Website, is a web 2.0 website that leverage communities’ power to translate English articles into Simplified Chinese.  It is said that it has attracted more than 50,000 users to date and received about 50 to 100 submission of translated artices everyday. One of the many features of yeeyan is that it can present the original English  and translated Chinese to be listed side-by-side. The following is a screenshot:

Yeeyan Bilingual Presentation

Patents offer protection over innovation. If you want to be proteced for your innovative technologies in China, you need also file your application in China (probably through PCT). But the language stated need to be in the local language, in this case Simplified Chinese. A good English to Chinese translator can help you convert your original version into the target language. Machine translation will certainly got you no where. Don’t even think about it.

Tags: patents

I’ll start a series of posts on learning Chinese. Chinese is a beautiful language and it has the most speakers, about 1.17 billion, that’s about one-fifth of the world population.

Originally, its the indigenous language spoken by the Han Chinese in China. It belongs to Sino-Tibetan family of languages. In China, there are many dialects of Chinese (controversies exist regarding the distinction between languages and dialects).

Tags: Learning Chinese

Like many of us, if you’re using FireFox browser to explore the Internet, especially if you’re frequently looking for information from webpages other than your competent languages, there is pleasant surprise from the FireFox community: gTranslate add-on.

With gTranslate,  all you need to do is just by selecting and right-clicking over the text, and you’ll get you the translation of any text in a webpage. Of course, the translation is not performed by FireFox. It makes use of Google translation services, but it is not affliated with Google. Image titles and alt attribute can also be translated too. Chinese-English and English-Chinese translations, including both Simplified and Traditional Chinese are supported.

With open source software, things like this are plenty. It just makes our lives easier.

Tags: Google Translation Services

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is only days away. This summer game will have 28 sports, 302 events, starting from August 6 to 24. Some of the official English-Chinese translations have been released. The following list is various sports in aquatics. In swimming, we’ll have Freestyle(自由泳), Backstroke(仰泳), Butterfly(蝶泳), Individual Medley(混合泳), Medley Relay(自由泳接力), and Marathon 10km(10公里公开水域). In diving, we’ll have Individual Springboard(跳板), Synchronized Springboard(双人跳板), Individual Platform(跳台) as well as Synchronized Platform(双人跳台). In addition, aquatics also include Synchronized Swimming(花样游泳) and Water Polo(水球).

It usually costs much more for a potential translation buyer to use translations produced by someone who’s not a professional translator. Wrong translations or inappropriate translations not only drive away your potential customers, but also damage your corporate image. And this is usually something we can’t afford to pay. On the country, choosing a good Chinese translator, the following restaurant is highly likely to bring in more customers, won’t it? [Apparently, some dude used machine translation and didn't know anything about English]

The Economist, known as 经济学人 in Chinese, has been voluntarily translated by a group of Chinese translators. The translated articles are posted on this website http://www.ecocn.org/wordpress/.  Through their contribution, millions of Chinese are now able to read the Economist quite easily, of course in Simplified Chinese translations.

According to ChinaDaily, the Chinese translation project was initiated by Shi Yi, a 37-year-old insurance broker, who enjoy the magazine’s “short length and dry humor”. It turns out that he’s not the only one who likes to read the Economist and to translate into Chinese. It catches on and soon began to draw many more translators. Now every two weeks, a collection of articles translated from the past two issues are released in PDF format.

Since anyone can translate and publish their work, the quality of their English-Chinese translations are not consistent. There’re good translations, and there’re not-so-good ones. But as to the informational purpose, it served it well. This is something of a web 2.0 application, though much organisation is still needed. There’s no business models available and they don’t have a clear financial goal.

Tags: translation website

As the richest man in the world for more than a decade, Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates decided to donate all his fortune - about 58 billion dollars - to his charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s really hard to believe for many people, especially those nouveau riche here in China. Even though Mr. Gates is leaving his company, but he will be Microsoft’s non-excecutive chairman and will be working in his office at Microsoft one day a week. Many people hate Bill Gates, many more respect him, not because he created the monster Microsoft, but because he helps us to understand that helping people is truely meaningful.