Galaxy Rise

"Wisdom begins in wonder."

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Anonymous asked: Are you still in China mate?

Yep, back in Australia in like 4 days, though

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pensiveskies asked: Ahh that's incredible! It must take so much work.. Chinese is so hard, especially all the different tones. Kudos to you Chris haha. ps. Winter is the best season in the world.

Haha, thanks. And, agreed, I’m looking forward to Winter. I feel kind of cheated, actually, I figured if a place has a nickname like ‘the Ice City’ it should at least snow a little bit in Summer. It’s actually depressingly warm. That’s okay, I’ll be freezing to death in a couple of months.

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pensiveskies asked: how fluent are you in chinese now!

Haha, not too bad! I can have a conversation about anything pretty naturally. Reading and writing is harder, but I can usually read the news with some difficulty and preferably a dictionary.

I actually just signed up to a University course for a semester yesterday, which starts in… about an hour. Should be a lot more work than the school I’ve been going to until now (plus I’ll still be going there as well), but I’m pretty excited. I want to improve as much as I can before I go back to Australia and hopefully do this NAATI professional translator accreditation thing.

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Translations

Lately, I’ve decided that I really want to work as a translator. Probably not as a career, but I’d love to be able to do it as a side job while I’m at Uni, and see where things go from there. Doing translation work is something I used to vaguely mention as one of the reasons I was studying Chinese, thinking maybe ten years down the track or something. Now, it seems like something I could realistically be capable of doing in the not too distant future, and I’m more and more excited about the idea. (I’m also studying more and more obsessively to get there, which is why at 11pm on a Friday night I’m taking a short break from studying Chinese to write a blog post about translating Chinese.) I’ve had a look at the requirements for NAATI professional translator accreditation, and it seems doable. (It looks as though I’ll have to learn to read traditional characters, which will be a bit of a headache.)

I made my first real attempt to translate a news article this evening. I didn’t quite appreciate until now the difference between understanding something in a foreign language and actually translating it. It’s harder than you’d think! Unless you’re not someone who regularly underestimates the difficulty of things and overestimates their own abilities, in which case maybe it’s around about as hard as you’d think. One way or another, with heavy reliance on dictionaries (including the absolutely brilliant and indispensable Nciku), I think I did a passable job. Nothing like a professional standard, of course, but the meaning is all there. It’s definitely convinced me that I need to practice translating things, rather than just reading them.

I was going to post the result here for interest’s sake, but it turns out that’s a kind of fuzzy in terms of copyright. Here is a link to the original article, though?

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Anonymous asked: Why do you want to switch uni, Chris. Were you unhappy with UQ? Will you continue to do Law?

I was happy enough at UQ, and I love the campus there, but it didn’t seem to be really outstanding for any of the things I want to study. Linguistics was more or less dead. Philosophy felt pretty average, although part of that might have been that first-year was all things we studied in high-school. Law was pretty good, I think, but I don’t get the impression that UQ law is anything exceptional compared to the other decent Australian unis.

I’ll probably keep going with Law. A career in law probably isn’t what I want, but I’m not ready to give up that fallback option, or the advantages that come from being able to point to a law degree. I’ll probably change my Arts degree to something to do with Chinese or languages, though. Whether that means switching majors or changing to a different degree, I don’t know, I haven’t really looked into it yet.

Not sure specifically where I’d go, yet, either. When I went to UQ, it was mostly just because my dad’s place was nearby so I could stay there for a while getting set up. So if I do decide to go elsewhere, this time I’ll actually look at places that are good for the things I want to study. ANU is supposed to be good for Asian Languages and for Law, the downside being that it’s Canberra. Otherwise I’ll look at Unis in Sydney and Melbourne.

On a side note, I really want to do some kind of translation work through uni. I don’t know what kind of opportunities there are for low-level work without a specialised degree or accreditation in Australia, though; I hope it’s a possibility.

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voiceinquartz asked: Dude are you still in China? When are you back?

Yeah, still here. I’ll probably leave around February next year. I want to stay as long as possible, but have to leave a bit of time to prepare for Uni, especially since I might think about switching to a different Uni.

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Google+

theydothingsdifferentlythere:

Am I the only one that feels that the marketing for Google+ was oddly similar to Eric Cartman’s ‘You Can’t Visit My Theme Park’ technique?

You mean the invite-only thing? Gmail used to be like that. It worked, too, I felt pretty special for having an account. Then again, I was about 14. (Never really watched Southpark(?), but the name seems pretty self-explanatory)

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“Hey :)

just wondering how everything is going over there? give me a response which is as detailed as possible :)”

Hey! Sorry I haven’t really been in touch. Everything is going pretty well. I have two two-hour classes a day, and studying most of the time. I sat an exam a couple of weeks ago, the new HSK level 5, results come out around the end of this month. I have an apartment here which is pretty decent. Learning to cook a bit, but mostly go out to eat, which is pretty cheap and convenient anyway. A couple of friends have just left to work in other parts of China for a few months, which is a pity, but they’ll be back before I leave. I’m hoping to go travelling a bit more when I get the chance. That’s pretty much it, really. Hope everything’s going well there, too!