4 Effective Tips to Achieve Better Quality Chinese Document Translation

Recently updated on February 21st, 2024 at 08:32 pm

How do you go about assessing the quality of a Chinese document translation especially if you don’t understand the language?

In this article, we’ve outlined 4 remarkably effective ways and what you need to do to assess the English to Chinese translation quality. It’s a model that works a treat for almost all Chinese business translation projects. But before we can assess translation quality, we first need to be clear about what that looks like.

What’s a High-Quality Chinese Document Translation?

A high-quality Chinese document translation is one that captures the meaning of the original text and is appropriately worded, free from error, internally consistent, and culturally relevant.

This definition identifies the 5 criteria needed for an English to Chinese translation to be high-quality:

• Equivalence of meaning
• Appropriate wording/expression
• No mistakes
• Fully consistent
• Culturally appropriate

Which we can do by asking these five questions:

• Does it convey the meaning of the original text?
• Does it read like it should?
• Are there any grammatical or spelling mistakes?
• Has it handled everything consistently?
• Is the translation localized to be culturally appropriate?

4 Effective Tips to Achieve Better Quality Chinese Translation

Hire a Professional Chinese Translator

Starting with translation by a native speaker of the target language is crucial. That translator should also be fluent to a near-native level in the source language. 

💡Check the Chinese translator’s qualifications and customers’ reviews.

Reverse Translate

Trying to translate your text back into English can be a good first step:

• You can get yourself a good dictionary and look up the words used if you know how to break down Chinese characters
• Or find a site that quickly does a full-text translation

Obviously, these “translations” need to be taken with a grain of salt, but if you’re simply looking to check if what you got translated is correct, that’s a start. A pitfall may be that if you were given a machine translation to begin with, machines won’t have difficulties translating it back into English.

If you want to make sure you’re using the right kind of language in Chinese, I would go exploring and research this more.

Reverse Search

Another way to verify the quality of your Chinese document translation is to do a “reverse” search – take a word or part of your translation and type “[partofyourtranslation/word] 英文”→ 英文 means English, so this’ll bring up pages of Chinese speakers trying to find how to say what you were looking up in English. It’s usually a good way to assess whether this is what you wanted to say in your translation or not.

Proofread by a Senior Translator

A senior, more experienced Chinese translator can help assess whether all meaning in the source text has been correctly carried over into the translation, with nothing extra added and nothing omitted. It’s usually done by systematically comparing the translation and original, phrase-by-phrase or sentence-by-sentence.

💡In addition, there are three aspects to a Chinese document translation’s quality of wording:

naturalness, ambiguity, and tone/style

Here’re a few criteria to assess the quality of wording:

• The uses of natural-sounding language, flows nicely, is easy to understand, and has no awkward-sounding parts;
• Whether it has any text that’s ambiguous and so open to misinterpretation;
• Whether it has a similar tone and formality/informality to the original and an appropriate style for the intended purpose or function of the text.

💡Apart from the above, it’s important to evaluate the translator’s use of format and layout to ensure they are appropriate and consistent throughout.

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