#translation study

[polyglot-thought]

English in the Hospital 醫院就診用語 (1977) by Jean T. Swaim

Medical terms in Chinese and English

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Hello everyone, recently I have found a helpful booklet on medical terms in Chinese and English created by Jean T. Swaim that is sponsored by The Ladies Visiting Committee of Massachusetts General Hospital that you can read for free as a PDF on massgeneral.org here. According to the English translation of the introduction, this booklet was intended for native Chinese speakers who do not speak English and who are patients at Massachusetts General Hospital, but I am sharing it here because I believe it to be extremely useful for bilingual English and Chinese speakers who want to enter the medical interpreting and translation profession.

It's only drawback for students of the Chinese language is that it only uses Traditional characters and there is no pinyin. There could also be outdated terms due to the fact that it was last edited 48 years ago.

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Please correct me if I made a mistake

[polyglot-thought]

How to use Reverso Context for Language Learning and Translation

(Not including their AI translation feature)

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Reverso is a website that provides dictionaries, example sentences, and machine translations for a multitude of languages.

The website has an AI translator, which in my opinion isn’t that great with Mandarin (the language I use the website for the most) so I never use it, but I don’t usually use machine/automatic translations anyways.

I use Reverso’s Context feature very often and it helps immensely with translating and learning Mandarin, as well as other languages. However, keep in mind not every language has an equal amount of quality material. It’s not ideal for beginners either, because there’s no settings to make simpler sentences show up more.

As of October 13th, 2023, Reverso supports 26 languages!

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How To

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For this example, I’m going to search the Mandarin word “平常”

* Note: A majority of the database seems to use Simplified characters, so use Simplified most of the time or it may not recognize the word.

Now you can guess from context if you didn’t already have this word in your dictionary of choice: 平常 must mean ‘usually; normally; typical; etc.’

This feature works very well with common word combinations that don’t have a direct translation in a dictionary.

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Downsides

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One downside I notice a lot is that the highlighting will be incorrect or sometimes completely absent. Other times the English translation doesn’t match the example sentence at all. So, if you are not an intermediate learner be extra careful using the context function for translations.

For example, I searched the word “洒泪” (to be shedding tears) and the first result I got highlighted the translation as “during”!

But if you are signed in to the website, you can submit corrections easily.

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Please correct me if I made a mistake

Created October 2023

[polyglot-thought]

Something weird I’ve encountered as an amateur translator that I did not expect is that occasionally I will find myself translating something that was a translation of an English translation. For example I just finished an English translation of a Mandarin translation of Jingle Bells.

Why do I takes these up I do not know, but I will say the Mandarin version is not a direct translation so it does warrant being translated.

[lize-blog1]

參考書目

昨天完成了一小時的筆試，需要翻譯兩段短文，英譯中是一篇新聞報導，對我來說算是駕輕就熟；中譯英是一篇小品，翻譯時便覺得自己辭彙貧瘠。

回來後，開始思索要如何入手。家中各類書籍不少，許多都只是放著不看。應該由哪裹開始呢，先列出自己喜歡的範疇吧：

中文：史記﹣﹣＞寫故事的脈絡語氣，文言用辭

英文：the speeches ﹣﹣＞在演講辭裹學修辭，會否是個好方法呢？