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?