TRANSLATION TOOLS

TRANSLATION TOOLS
翻译工具

I Cannot recall life before GOOGLE. My knowledge of Chinese is limited. I can read but barely write the language. Thanks to "copy-and-paste" and googling, I was able to translate an economics article for an American journal.

The verb to google or google it (yourself) is a neologism meaning "to perform a Web search" (primarily with the Google Web search engine) or an unknown set of files (the entire Web) with the Google search engine. "Mary googled for Wikipedia references." Contrast with grep. The coinage of the word is mainly due to the tremendous popularity of the search engine. The American Dialect Society chose the verb to google as the "most useful word of 2002." Source This lends weight to my contention that Chinglish, through evolution, will be the number 2 language in the world by 2088.

Just by using the Google translator, Chinese Google search engine and Answer.com below, I can do a competent job of English/Chinese translation. The translator obviously has to have an understanding of the subject he/she is translating. Otherwise, it will result in highly comical text.

For example, I want to translate : "The American economy will benefit in the long run from all forms of international trade, including the outsourcing abroad of call-center and software programming jobs."

Enter the above into the translation box gives:

美国经济从长远看将有益于从国际贸易的所有形式, 包括 outsourcing 外洋叫中心和软件编程工作.

Well, we need to know the Chinese word for "outsourcing". I know that 中心 (center) is correct. I am not sure about the translations for "call" and "abroad". I would proceed as follow:

Step 1:

This is the trick I find useful: I will google a mixture English and Chinese words so that Google will return results from bilingual pages, from which I can can a feel of the correct Chinese words to use. I google "美国 outsourcing call center 中心". One of the search results is:

外包，英文是outsourcing，指的是公司把部分服务或生产工作交给另一方去完成，这一方可以是另一家 ... 例如，呼叫中心（call center）就是一种业务流程外包的形式。 ...
wss.mofcom.gov.cn/aarticle/a/200411/20041100298885.html - 17k - 12 Jun 2005 - Cached - Similar pages

Now I have:

美国经济将有益于从国际贸易的所有形式, 包括外包外洋呼叫中心和软件编程工作.

Step 2:

I don't quite like "外洋" for abroad. I can play around with Google or use Answer.com below. This gives answers in English and several other languages where applicable. Answer.com gives 異國, 海外 for "abroad". 海外 seems right.

Use Answer.com for
"abroad"

Concise information in one click

Step 3.

We now have 美国经济从长远看将有益于从国际贸易的所有形式, 包括外包海外呼叫中心和软件编程工作. My Chinese is not that good, but I could still play around to arrive at:

从长远看, 国际贸易的所有形式, 包括外包海外呼叫中心和软件编程工作将有益于从美国经济.

Seems about right. :)