On Translation
One of the biggest hindrances in learning English is the tendency to translate everything. It takes efforts and time for a beginner to overcome the urge to translate before they put it out in English. This is a bad habit that every language learner should work to get rid of. If someone is learning English and trying to learn by translation, I’d say that is one of the worst ways to learn English and that should be stopped.
We all know that numbers are hard to learn. Many people probably don’t know why it’s hard. But the reason is very simple. We translate each number back and forth and that process takes time. As we get better, the tendency to translate ebbs. People who have mastered English are able to think, speak, and write in English with ease. Just like we are able to understand numbers without translating them, we should be able to understand all other English words and phrases without translaton. When we hear “desk”, we should immediately have an image of a desk in our mind. We shouldn’t need to have an image of a “桌子”.
Many times we see questions about how to say this or that in English. I would suggest those who ask these questions to deal with the issue of expressing their ideas the other way. Instead of formulating the ideas in Chinese, people should try to think in English. What you come up with may not be exactly what you wish to express, but don’t let the deficiency in the richness of the expression deter your effort. If you feel that the English phrases and sentences are not enough, try to use some other words. Make changes to what you come up with and refine them. It takes determined efforts to overcome the propensity to think in Chinese and speak in English but I’m sure over the long run your English will get better faster.
I think most of us are able to engage conversations in fluent English without using a lot of translation. In casual conversations, we talk about things that are simple and familiar to us. Thus after many practices our brains have been properly wired. Yet not all of us are able to write in English without first attempting to organize our thoughts in Chinese. This is why it’s so difficult for people to write essays in English. To write well, even in Chinese, we need to have well organized ideas and then we need to find the words and phrases to put our ideas on paper. If we insert translation into this process, it’s not hard to see why writing in English seems to be so hard.
People might think that I am a fan of translating poems, after a long series of my translation of Venus and Adonis. Actually I think learning by translation is one of the worst ways to learn. Working on translating hard poems is even worse than that. I don’t see any benefit in attempting to translate Chinese poems into English. Those activities should be reserved to people who have mastered both languages and are able to express their ideas in writing in both languages. In the mean time, kudos for those translation enthusiasts, your works have produced some of the best translations.
So, don’t translate!
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