«A Basis for Scientific and Engineering Translation»excerpt

It's a challenge, but that's why God gave the gift of OCD to engineers. Who else would worry about how to translate "Fender Washer" from Bantu to Yiddish.

Seriously, I was translating some cable wiring diagrams from Japanese, using Babelfish and I kept running into "sad" wires. Just as I was considering ordering Prozac for all the EEs in Japan, I happened to glance out the window to see a gloomy, overcast, drizzly day and realized it also meant "gray".

Just part of our jobs, I suppose. By the way, I love to find those old terms; they're interesting.

Well, i am now reading this book written by Michael Hann from University of Mainz . It

is

a good book actually. In fact, as TVP45 points out, it is not easy to do this job. ON one

hand, it may take me enormous energy and time to sieve through large amount of

materials to get what i want. And on the other hand, there are some variations and

some misspellings to the original technicial terms which puts some road blocks

between me and the correct(sometimes only most suitable) answer. I am now a

moderator at http://www.jxcad.com.cn/thread.php?fid-91.html . This is a good

gathering place of specialists in many branches of mechnicial engineering. I believe

that is a good source to ask and check for questions encountered during translation.

I do Japanese <> English too. Kanji character words I can usually deal with (since the kanji has some meaning connected with it even when it's alone), although they sometimes take a little "leap of faith" to connect the points, especially with Japanese. Worse are katakana words, only sound with no connected meaning by itself. I'll always remember trying to translate something that sounded like "sermit" in Japanese and ending up learning about "thermite" before I finally found the more appropriate "cermet". And of course the abbreviating in Japanese: "pasukon" for "personal computer". Translating does take a lot of energy, but even worse is interpreting, which I am occasionally called on to do, in both directions. I can only do it for a few days before I'm completely exhausted. But I do learn a lot from doing the translation, and actually understood a doctor's explanation in Japanese better than my Japanese wife when I recently had an operation. I understood the first time it was explained, but my wife kept asking the doctor to repeat it. And it also causes you to think a bit differently (or more carefully, maybe?) in your own native language. I know I do.

I have been doing translation and i know how it feels to work around the clock. Last time i was translating one bidding document with a total page of 88 . It is really amazing how i survived from that. It took me 4 days to accomplish that job. I once told my client that 4 days are not enough for this but they seemed not very happy to hear that because it seems that all they need is just-so-so translation. What a pity ~~