Parallel text English/Mandarin children's story - reviewer request

[PaulaPanama]

Hi all, 

 

I have written a 3000 words children's story, and had it translated to Mandarin (Pinyin and Simplified characters) and have now published it for the Kindle in Amazon.

 

The layout is parallel text i.e. the same paragraph printed in simplified characters, pinyin, and English in turn.

 

I speak no Chinese myself, so I am relying on the translator for the characters and pinyin.

 

The book is called 'Princess Kitty and the Crystal Palace', and came about when I helped a friend who is a mural painter, with a wall mural at the Crystal Palace Chinese Restaurant and Takeaway in Chelmsford.  It is suitable for girls aged around 8 - 12.

 

I am posting to ask whether any forum members would kindly take a look, and let me have feedback about the style and quality of the translation.  I would also be interested to hear what language learners think of the layout, whether this form of parallel text is helpful to young language learners or not, and also any other issues I may not be aware of.  Roddy has already kindly pointed out an issue with the Pinyin, which I will take up with the translator.

 

You can see the first few paragraphs by using the 'look inside' feature in Amazon you can access this at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H7M5CUC

 

If you decide you would like to review the book, please let me know, and I will provide you with a full .pdf copy.

 

I may also be able to make the book available for free for download to the Kindle on a particular day, and I can notify you when this will be.  Because Chinese characters do not display on Kindle devices that are 2nd generation and earlier, I have also published a version in English and Pinyin only, so please let me know which version you would prefer.

 

Many thanks

 

Paula

 

[stoney]

I like the layout. It's better than pinyin over each word. Preferably, I would have the pinyin and English on a separate page. If it's too easy to see the pinyin/Engish, then it's very tempting to "cheat" rather than struggle to remember a word.

The English is very much appreciated especially if there are more complex grammar patterns and idiomatic language. I hope you will write material for adults in the future.

[PaulaPanama]

Hi Stoney, thanks for your reply and feedback, much appreciated.

 

I had thought about splitting the text on separate pages as Penguin do with their printed parallel texts, and you can do that in the Kindle, but only if you format it like a print book.  This takes away some of the user experience people expect from a Kindle, i.e. device independent, flowing text, and customisable font size.  This is really why I didn't do it.

 

Kindle have an 'Enhanced Edition' formatting guide.  This lets you do things like attach audio and video to individual paragraphs, and this is something I may look at doing soon.  However you need the new Kindle HDX, or the Kindle reader software installed on a tablet like and iPad for example to use it, it won't work on standard Kindle devices.  

 

I think your suggestion is valid, so I will have another look through the Enhanced Edition Standard, and see if it may be possible to tag each paragraph as 'English', 'Characters' and 'Pinyin', and see if there may be a way for the user to opt to hide the text marked with a particular tag.  This would add to the experience of readers that are trying to be disciplined with their learning, but find it hard not to 'cheat'.

 

I'm currently working as editor on one piece of adult non-fiction, which I hope to publish before February.  As this will be aimed partly at overseas Chinese, I am having this translated.  However I wasn't going to do it as parallel text, rather just as two separate versions.  I am interested in publishing English/Mandarin parallel text for adults, but I probably won't do it with content that I write myself.

 

Kind regards

 

Paula

[mikelove]

FWIW, you really ought to think about re-doing the cover; to be honest it makes the whole book look 'cheap' as it stands now, and if people get that impression they may not even bother to look inside.

 

The last character in the second line is actually in a different font style than the other characters - seems like somebody highlighted one too many characters when they were applying a different font - so you'll definitely want to change that to put all of the characters in the same font. For this sort of book the style of that last character (Regular Script) is actually probably a better fit than the style of the other characters (Ming/Song) - closer in style to the brush script font you use for the English title.

 

Also, the purple text in general looks kind of murky against that picture background, particularly around the princess' hair - you might want to lighten / fade out the image a bit so that the text stands out more, or play around with some other colors / text decoration styles (outlining the text in one color and filling it in a different one, e.g.).

[Kenny同志]

The first line of the first story reads: '在一個很遠很遠的地方，有一條非常寬廣的黃河.'

I am afraid that the Chinese is flawed. If '黃河' is a proper noun here, you cannot say '一條黃河' because it implies that there are other 黃河s; if it is not, the expression sounds as awkward as '一張黃桌‘. A better way to say it is probably ’一條黃色的河‘.

Edit:

 

I am not saying that in no contexts can '一條黃河' be used to mean a yellow river. In some, it can. For example, 沿岸幾家工廠天天排汙，這條河已經成了一條黃河. The grammar behind this I can't quite explain.

 

Edit:

 

The Chinese is translated from English, but without being informed of this in one of the first pages of the book readers may take the Chinese for the original, hence my 假設 that 黃河 is a proper noun.
 

[PaulaPanama]

Mike, thanks so much for your honest feedback, I really value this.  

 

I'm going to get a redesign done of the cover.

 

As I don't read or speak Chinese, I hadn't picked up on the formatting issue, well spotted.  Would you be kind enough to glance over the whole text if I can get you the .pdf?

 

Kind regards

 

Paula

[PaulaPanama]

Thanks Kenny.

 

Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.  I see you are a professional translator, so I won't ask if you would kindly look at the whole text, but thanks to alerting me to the possibility of further grammar errors.

 

Kind regards

 

Paula

[Kenny同志]

You're welcome, Paula.

[anonymoose]

Does 就在最宽广的河中间 really mean "In the middle of the river, just where it is nearly at its widest"? Or is this an acceptable translation anyway since it does not affect the general meaning of the story?

[mikelove]

Paula - I'm not a native speaker myself so I don't honestly think my feedback would be all that useful. Good luck to you though.

[Kenny同志]

Does 就在最宽广的河中间 really mean "In the middle of the river, just where it is nearly at its widest"? Or is this an acceptable translation anyway since it does not affect the general meaning of the story?

It's unacceptable by my standards.

 

The problem of the expression becomes obvious if we look at its skeleton, i.e. 最寬的中間, which sound rather, well, silly and awkward, if not ungrammatical or illogical. 中間 is a point here, isn't it?

 

 

In the middle of the river, just where it is at nearly at its widest, is a paradise island kingdom, …

 

If I had been the translator, I'd have put it into Chinese this way: “在河面差不多最寬地方，有一個天堂島王國坐落在中央，……

 

Edit:

The translation in the book can be changed to 就在最寬廣的河段的中央 to be clearer but then again such a technical word as 河段 should be avoided at all costs in a children's book. Besides this, the other thing I don't quite like about the improved translation is that it has two 的s, making it somewhat awkward. Well dropping the second 的 is OK but still 河段中央 is really not the language for children.

[lechuan]

As a general context for the english text, I think it would be more lively to use present tense instead of past tense.

[PaulaPanama]

Hi Lechuan

 

Its an interesting idea, I hadn't really thought about doing it that way, I just write in English as it comes to me.  I think if stories are aimed at much younger readers, it could certainly make it more interesting to limit the story to the present tense.

 

Kind regards

 

Paula

[Demonic_Duck]

The pinyin is incorrect, it's di vi ded by syl la bles ra ther than words and has some odd capitalisation in places too. It also looks (at least on the Amazon preview copy) as if the font suffers from the problem whereby vowels with tone marks on them appear different to the surrounding text (in this case, smaller), which looks a bit ugly.

[PaulaPanama]

Thanks for your input Demonic Duck.

 

Would you like a full copy as a .pdf?

 

You are not the first person to mention the Pinyin, which I understand can be split into syllables for children's books for much younger children, majority opinion is that it's not appropriate for this book.  The minority opinion, unfortunately, is being expressed by the translator (either that or we are at a massive misunderstanding, despite constant correspondence about this for the last 2 days).

 

I might need to borrow those horns, so I can lock them with the translator.

 

I see what you mean about the font, can anyone recommend a better text font for Pinyin?

 

Regards

 

Paula

[Demonic_Duck]

Sure, I'd love a full copy to look at (although I can't promise any particularly insightful comments on the language used for the translation as I think it's safe to say my Chinese still falls somewhere within the broad band of "intermediate").

 

As for fonts, having never tried to publish anything myself I'm not sure what laws govern fonts used for books/ebooks, but I don't think there should be any problems with such widespread fonts as Ariel, Calibri and Times New Roman for displaying letters with those diacritics.

 

Personally, I feel it's bad form to split up the pinyin like that, whether the book is aimed for young native learners, young foreign learners, or older foreign learners. It doesn't add anything and only makes the text less readable (admittedly I don't personally know of any evidence to back this up, but it certainly breaks up the reading experience more than is necessary).

[alanmd]

Your translator is wrong. Textbooks use spaces only on pinyin word boundaries, which reflects the way that people speak, so 地方 on the first page should be "dìfāng", not "dì fāng". Only dictionaries add spaces for each pinyin syllable. Perhaps they are using some sort of software to generate the pinyin character by character, and can't be bothered to correct the word boundaries?

 

The first two paragraphs have spaces between every pinyin syllable, but from the third paragraph of the Amazon preview the book switches to putting spaces only on word boundaries, which is inconsistent and I think worse than choosing either pinyin spacing style consistently.

 

I would recommend getting an unbiased native Chinese speaker to look over the translator's work.

[PaulaPanama]

Copy on its way to you Demonic Duck!  Many thanks, any feedback will be welcome, including any response you get from reading to any children.

Alanmd, yes I think you may well be right about the software generated pinyin, and I've booked some time with a native speaker at Harlow Chinese Community Centre to review the text.  Thanks for your advice.

 

Kind regards

 

Paula

[alanmd]

You're welcome- I love the idea of more parallel texts being out there, but you have to make sure that the quality is high or reviewers will jump all over you,and not all mandarin translators are of the same standard. Other readers such as Chinese Breeze and Mandarin Companion, which are also aimed at beginners/children are very careful about stating how many unique words they used, and you might want to make sure that your tranlsator is capable of doing a similar job of rewriting the story in simple words that beginners/children can understand. A simply story that uses complex words or idioms isn't of much use.

 

This sounds like a great opportunity for you to learn a bit of Mandarin- with a few minutes a day you could very probably read your own stories within a few months!

[PaulaPanama]

Well thanks to all this feedback, I'm now attending the Chinese Saturday school at the Chinese Community Centre in Harlow U.K., as much to get some help from people that are not in a different time zone for the unbiased native speaker's opinion, as to learn Chinese, so we'll see how it goes.

One problem with a translator in Beijing is the difference in time zone, effectively we only communicate in about a 4 hour window, and that's only if I start work at 6 a.m.

Kind regards to all

Paula