Translation for practice?

[sonming]

Hey all, I'm living in Taiwan and hardcore busting it out on the self-study path. I was wondering if anyone uses translation of documents (from their native language to Chinese) as a study method, and if so, if you find/found it helpful at all. Part of me seems like it would be a good way to force you to use sentence patterns you aren't very familiar with, and try to make sure you carefully select vocabulary. On the other hand, I have a tendency to want to "zone in" on foreign language when I study, meaning not having my mother tongue present if possible.

So, can anyone comment on the usefulness of translation as a study method?

[歐博思]

It probably should be done to an extent but I don't personally find it that useful. I would much prefer to read some natively written material instead in order to learn new vocab and sentence structure.

[anonymoose]

I think it's useful translating from your native language into Chinese on the proviso that you have someone who can check your translation for you.

[fanglu]

I have done this a few times and found it ok as a study technique, but to be honest I think I get more out of just writing directly in Chinese. You're not so constrained by non-Chinese grammar structures and its more enjoyable, which means you're more likely to stick with it.

[bande]

For the original poster, how far along in your studies are you? I think everyone can benefit from translation from their native language into chinese. However, if you're not at a relatively advanced level, I'm not sure I would recommend putting a lot of time or any time into that kind of an activity. I've found translation into chinese difficult because of how different chinese prose is from English. It takes a lot of skill to write decent paragraph length chinese prose considering there are so many bad habits from english that you have to remove. The collocations are different, punctuation is different, subjects are repeated more so than it seems like you would see in english, and I'm sure that are lots of other areas I'm not mentioning. However, I found a piece of advice from another forum helpful. A poster mentioned that he preferred to take text in a target language, which would be chinese in our case, and make a machine translation with google. While he found that method useful for simple reading, I have a feeling it could also be useful for simple translation. You could easily start with a text that you know has good chinese, put it through google translate, and then translate it back into chinese and compare your translation against the original chinese. Benjamin Franklin supposedly did something similar with english texts where he would semi memorize them, attempt to rewrite them a week later, and then try to correct his errors, so that he could reproduce the original text.