Trainee Trainee's Statement of Their Translating Experience A To me, translating from English into Chinese seems to be much easier a task than translating from Chinese into English. B It is said that poems are the most difficult to translate. My experience with advertisement translation tells me that it should be no less difficult. At least, ads are more difficult to deal with than technical instructions. C My trainer often assigns us many sentence translation exercises. It's not difficult for me to offer satisfactory translations. But when I'm supposed to deal with paragraphs, the picture looks rather different. D I feel frustrated that I need to consult a bilingual dictionary so frequently to figure out what an English word means in the course of translating. E I work with an international company. The language for all the documents and written correspondences at work is English. In most cases I have no difficulty reading them at all. But I still remember how I struggled to complete the task I had been assigned, that is, to translate the user's book of a newly published software for local customers. It posed no difficulties when I read it but turned out to be a torture when I had to re-produce it in Chinese. F Whenever I finish my Chinese-English translation exercise, I read it through. But it always reads awkward and far from idiomatic. I feel like saying things in a Chinese way with English words. G I'm a lover of literature. I notice that there has been a tendency in China since the 1980s to re-translate many significant works written in foreign languages. H English subjects turn out to have been treated very differently both in my own translation and in other people's translations I read. I All the English translations of poems written in Classical Chinese cannot compare to their originals at all. I'm proud of the Chinese language for its capacity to create beauty. J I often wonder whether there are any differences between writer-translators like Lu Xun and those translators who are not professional writers. K Although I haven't had much experience in being commissioned for translations, the limited experience still impresses me that the fees paid to translators are too modest and do not match the efforts made by the translators. L When I was in high school we often discussed over what works we read recently. The fact that we always referred to what we read, for instance, as shashibiya de baofengyu (Shakespeare's Tempest) as if we were reading the English original seems to bother me somewhat now. What we read was actually the Chinese translations but nobody mentioned the work done by the translators. M I once read an English translation of the introduction to a tourist spot when I traveled by air. For some terms describing objects or customs unique to the given culture, the translator used the pinyin forms of the Chinese words and provided extra explanations as to what those objects or customs refer to. Those words of explanation were of course absent from the Chinese original. I was a bit curious how the translator decided what called for an explanation. N I found that the more I translate the better my English language proficiency. O I usually feel that translations offered for one and the same original vary from each other in many ways. P I came across a long English sentence recently and am not satisfied with any translations suggested so far for it either by myself or by my friends. I wonder how I can work out a satisfactory solution. Q Although I have done quite some translations, I am not in the least aware of how I did them at all.