Compare the translated sentence to the original.If necessary, recombine the parts and check grammar.Arrange the words according to Chinese grammar.Mix up the order of the translated words.I will provide more examples later and also give you some sentences to practise with. To illustrate the process, I will translate the sentence The apples I bought yesterday are very tasty. In short, the method I present here is meant to avoid writing English sentences with Chinese characters and instead urges you to first go down to the basic meaning of the sentence, then express that meaning in Chinese.īelow is a detailed description of the method. Getting that right when translating is mostly a matter of being able to look up words in a dictionary the right way, which is surprisingly hard. Beginners learn the building blocks from the textbook, but when asked to use these for translation, they stay too close to the English original and forget most of what they’ve learnt about Chinese syntax.Īs the students become more advanced, word order can still be a problem, but word usage and collocations are likely to become more important. In my experience, the biggest problem for beginners is word order and grammar, which is the focus of this article. I have taught many courses that include translation in some form. Improving your Chinese by translating from another language How to translate from your native language to Chinese If you struggle with that, this article is for you.įor more about translation in general, check out my other article about this topic, which also includes some exercises that work well for advanced students. More advanced students probably don’t need such an elaborate process, but can construct sentences directly in Chinese. The bulk of the article is aimed at beginner and lower intermediate students. In this article, I will discuss how to approach translation from your native language to Chinese. Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode:Īvailable on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Overcast, Spotify and many other platforms! The beginner’s guide to Chinese translation Many university courses include translation, but it’s rare in standardised proficiency tests Translation, either professionally or for personal use, is also one of the reasons often mentioned for learning the language in the first place. Regardless of how advanced your Chinese is, you will always encounter things you can say in your native language, but are unable to say in Chinese. Viewed from another angle, translation is an integral part of learning and using Chinese. This is not easily achieved, though, and beginners and lower intermediate students are stuck with translation before they internalise common words and basic grammar. The goal should be to form the sentences in Chinese, without going through another language first. If you construct sentences in your native language first, then translate them into Chinese, the process will often be slow and the result not so idiomatic. Translation from your native language is usually something to be avoided when learning a foreign language.
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