Reflection

In my experience, I used GT(Google Translation) when I read some information, watching English videos, or understanding some technical terms in specific fields.

GT is pretty easy to take up. Just a one-time experience can fully understand the whole function of the translation process.

When I use GT, I usually translate the whole paragraph first, and then narrow down the paragraph into sentences, phrases, and words.  

I use the same GT strategy for Bantaoyao translation.

I refined my translation after GT by searching other better word choices than GT provided, in accordance with different cultures, practices., and also, my personal preference.🤍 In addition, I think discussing with peers and teacher is enormously helpful, since people always have a different point of view, so that they can provide many aspects and advice that I didn’t think of.

When I use GT, some words can be translated into a totally contrary meaning in other languages. Especially in Chinese, we have many polysemous words, which can confuse the machine translating. Some slangs are difficult to be translated as well. For example,"喉韻" means "aftertaste" in colloquial usage. However, GT translates it literally as "throat rhyme".

Some ancient Chinese may not be translated properly in GT. Also, if there’s a typo or omit in the original text, the outcome of the GT translation may be very different. For example, in my Bantaoyao translation, the original Chinese script shows“縣定古”, which is a typo and it should be “縣定古蹟”. This error can’t be detected by GT, and GT simply translates the word into “County Dinggu“. It shows some funny and meaningless words like that.

I think GT is helpful in all the translation tasks that I’ve practiced in this course. Those tasks are quite long essays. That’s why using GT can be a time-saving way for translation when GT provides trustworthy grammar, a high accuracy preliminary structure and meaning of the translation, which gives me the direction of thinking way and helps me get into the swing of translating quickly.

As I said, GT is generally useful in every task. If there has to be an answer, I think GT is rather less suitable for my video 1 translation. It’s because the speaker’s talking style tends to omit some connections, so the meaning of every sentence got misunderstood or confused easily.

All in all, in my opinion, GT is a useful tool for me to translate in this course. Its translation is pretty precise in general. Its downside is that sometimes the structure may be quite stiff and formal, and some slangs are hard to be explained. Fortunately, it can be improved by human translators based on their knowledge of culture. It is also what I'm longing to be proficient in.