Translating is Hard Work!

For one thing, translating Chinese blog entries to English isn’t something that I started recently: all this while I have been taking up the habit to translate my own Chinese LJ posts since the beginning (until recently that I decided to only translate drifting thoughts and impromptu posts as I believe those are more worth sharing). And I still have to say that translating is hard work even though I have been doing so for like four years.

Recently I have been spending some time translating some useful Chinese articles on personal finances (which is posted in KLSE Financial Homework, my blog on financial matters which still lacks some original content ^^|||), and dealing with subtle nuances of dealing with different styles of expression can be a challenging task indeed. Sometimes I just sat down there cracking my head for several hours just to get the words right. And the thing about translating other people’s work is that not only you have to deal with preserving their meanings during the translation, you’d also have to deal with the quirks of the writing style of the original author. In other words, there’s times that I have to deal with decisions on whether I should modify the paragraph structure, debating whether a particular phrase is to be omitted, and worst of them all, arguing whether allowing my own opinions seeping in between the lines is permissible.

Those kind of things. Funny that I didn’t take up any language studies at all during my schooling/college years, but somehow I enjoyed writing a lot — as much as I hate expanding my vocabulary and learning the finer art of it. ^^||| So it sort of became a hobby of mine, I suppose?

Anyway, gotta scoot.