How can we know it is a good Chinese translation

How can I know it is a good Chinese translation?

You will always have a concern when you get a Chinese translation from a freelancer, especially you do not know Chinese.

You hire a Chinese proofreader, He or She make an overall comments on it. Or you get the comment from your client. The feedback may be positive, you will be relax.

However, the feedback may be negative. You forward them to the translator.

The translator say ‘sorry’ but sometimes you will get some responds from the translator as the following:

“I revise some texts - but not all as I insist that some translations are appropriate…”
“It is language art, not math. Even the proofreader made corrections, you send the translation to third person, and new issues possibly are occurred… it is endless!  ”

So what can we do now?

1. You should make effective investigation on your translator and proofreader.

• Was he/she born in China or where was he/she born? Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Singapore? Do not hire a proofreader from Hong Kong to check translations made by Mainland translators, and vice versa. I have to repeat - do not hope you hire an India person and get a good translations.


• How many years he/she live at a Chinese-Mandarin environment?
Note, living in China 10 years it is may not mean a good candidate if the person spent his first 10 years in China and left China since his/her 11.
Usually, Candidate should had finished his own High School course in China. It means the person lived in a Chinese language setting and learned Chinese language during he/she entire Language development ages.


• Errors can be sorted by various categories:
a. Make wrong meanings with original text
b. Typos: wrong characters, missing characters
c. Punctuation
d. whether Re- arrange sentences aligning to Chinese Language traditions.

For example:

Original text: “we have to re -organizing our existing process for our long term benefits”
Chinese: “为了长远的利益，我们不得不重新调整我们的现有流程” - it means “for our long term benefits, we have to re -organizing our existing process”

Here, we should delete ‘our’ before ‘long term benefits’, put ‘for our long term benefits’ at the beginning subject to Chinese Language Style.

Here I have to point that deleting ‘our’ before ‘long term benefits’ is a difference between best Chinese translator and others.

Overall, the errors belonged to a, b, and c are similar to ‘Math’ and the errors of category d are not accuracy as ‘Math’. Usually what cause we fall in disputes on a ‘best’ translation are judgements listing in category d.


So we can ask sample from the candidate, and check whether errors in category a\b\c can be found; which can help us to get ‘good’ translations.


• Candidates Background and Commitment

I have worked for an e-game betting site for a year. I believe I am the best translator my client can find. The English text involved not only gaming words, e.g.  ‘3 win in a row’, ‘Single win’… but also terms from games - e.g. “DD rune” (DD rune, refer to rune definitions of Dota 2), ‘First blood’ and ‘Baron’ (the boss in LOL). 
I can translate these terms accurately - not just I am a player of war3 or LoL, but also I always commit to get translation best done - so I will take time to google or consult others, have strong passion to summary my experience and collect other’s knowledge.

Others

• Do the translator should have great English levels?
A: if you want Chinese translations, certainly, the Chinese level is prior to the candidate’s English level. However the higher English level is the better.


• Why do you use ‘你’ not ‘您’ in a letter to my client?
If you know Chinese, you will know there are two Hanzi (words) can refer to ‘you’ in English.  One is 你; another one is ‘您’ - the latter something like “honorific” term.  So we should use ‘您’ in a letter to our clients?
No. Nowadays (2018) in China, if you want make a connections with someone, please do not say ‘您’. The time is changing, and the Language is changing… In China, to be ‘polite’ probably means ‘not close’ today. And I checked many user agreements and letters from famous China Internet Companies (e.g. Alibaba, Sina and zhihu.com) - They do not use ‘您’, only ‘你’!