Wednesday, July 13, 2011

MA Translation Services

Su Zhen asked me to translate her 2 minute commercial from Chinese into English. I said sure, no problem. I figured I could just copy and paste into Google translate and then modify from there. Instead of handing me a flash drive with her text neatly typed, she handed me her handwritten speech. Uh oh!

So was this going to be a challenge? I am never one to turn down a challenge. Step one was to transpose the entire speech into Google Docs. With my MDBG online dictionary, I found as many characters as I could and left blanks for Su Zhen to fill in. I honestly thought there would be more mistakes but I was pleasantly surprised when she handed it back to me with only a few corrections.

Great. But that was only step one. Step two was to not only translate it into English but make it sound like an American wrote it. I copied and pasted blocks of text into Google Translate and then rewrote the sentences so no one would suspect that this speech was originally written by a Chinese woman.

I finished this morning and emailed her the retyped Chinese version as well as the new English version. No feedback yet.
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