Need help translating short text into Chinese

[random_genius]

Hi everyone,

I don't know Chinese and neither am I interested in learning it (yet), but hopefully some of you do know it and would be willing to help me just briefly.

I would like to contact a certain Chinese manufacturer, and as I'm not certain they speak English (likely they do, but anyway), I would like to translate the following business enquiry text into Chinese Traditional and Simplified (as I hear, they have HQ in Taiwan and production in mainland China).

Dear Sir or Madame

We stumbled across your website, and given that it is a little outdated, we would like to know if you are still in inline roller skates manufacturing business?

We are very keen on your patented roller skates product.

Would you be interested in doing more business in the EU?

If possible, please reply in English.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards

I know I could just use Google Translate, but I don't know how quality the translation would be, and how that would make me, a prospect business partner, appear.

Thanks for your time, hopefully it won't take much of it. :-)

[Kenny同志]

inquiry.doc

Please see the attachment. I suggest you hire a professional translator for texts of such magnitude next time.

[random_genius]

Thank you very much. Professional translator? It's like 5 sentences, less than 70 words. I'm not paying €30 for that! You seem professional enough.

[imron]

Out of curiosity, how much do you think such a translation is worth?

[Kenny同志]

Professional translator? It's like 5 sentences, less than 70 words. I'm not paying €30 for that! You seem professional enough.

It won’t cost you that much. You may need to pay around ten dollars if the translator charges on the basis of the number of words, or 20-50 dollars if he/she has a flat rate for texts of less than a certain number of words.

Hiring a professional means you have to pay some money but it is much safer to do so. Beware, when you take a free translation, you accept all the potential risks too.

I know from my experience that quality translation is a rare product. There might be millions of English-Chinese translators, but the real competent ones are not many. Usually I only work with professionals I am quite familiar with.

A good translator can help you enhance the image of your company while an incompetent one will degrade it and hold back your potential partners and/or customers.

I know I could just use Google Translate, but I don't know how quality the translation would be, and how that would make me, a prospect business partner, appear.

Google Translate? If it were that useful, there wouldn’t be such people called human translators. The translation done by an application is nothing but nonsense (in almost all cases).

[skylee]

Google Translate? If it were that useful, there wouldn’t be such people called human translators. The translation done by an application is nothing but nonsense (in almost all cases).

While I completely agree with your suggestion that a company should get professional translation and pay for it, your comment on Google Translation is too harsh IMO. I did find it helpful when I needed to read websites/comments in Italian / Portugese. Of course sometimes the machine translation can be quite bad, but quite often it is helpful in providing the gist of the original text.

[Kenny同志]

Machine translation can help you grasp the gist of words in a foreign language, but that’s all. Nothing more can be expected of machine translation.

[aristotle1990]

That's not always true -- have you seen how well Google does French to English? Freakishly well, that is to say -- check out this translated Le Monde article, for example. I could almost believe it was originally written in English.

[Kenny同志]

Sometimes an application can do good translation between European languages, but not so often between Asian languages and European languages.

[random_genius]

Out of curiosity, how much do you think such a translation is worth?

I don't know, maybe it is worth $10, but as I see it, it should take a fluent Chinese speaker(/writer) at most 5 minutes to produce it. So if a translator's hourly wage is €50, that amounts to $6. I also know I gave lengthier and more detailed "professional" IT advice on other forums for free. Several times per week. I guess I was expecting that (and I got it — thanks!).

I know professional translation comes with some B2B guarantees, but for those couple of sentences — I intend to do all future communication in English, hopefully — that's just something I don't need.

Thanks again for the fast response.