Translation practice.
(Similar to translation golf, but hopefully less competitive and more about learning than minimizing characters.)
一。 Question: Take an interesting, relatively simple (jargonless) paragraph. Here's one from George Orwell's 1984:
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
Find an official Chinese translation (in spoiler space):
他身子往后一靠。一阵束手无策的感觉袭击了他。首先是,他一点也没有把握,今年是不是1984年。大致是这个日期,因为他相当有把握地知道,自已的年龄是三十九岁,而且他相信他是在1944年或1945年生的。但是,要把任何日期确定下来,误差不出一两年,在当今的时世里,是永远办不到的。
Together, these form the question.
二。 Answers contain two things:
The answerer provides their own translation of the original snippet written without help from the official translation, nor any other answers. We trust them not to cheat.
An answerer writes their own translation in spoiler space (without looking at the translation) and gives a self-critique after looking at the translations (what did you learn?), e.g.:
- explain your decisions [word and grammar choices; writing style; whether you were faithful to the text or chose less-faithful but more frequently used Chinese terminology, etc.],
- explain what you feel you did well, perhaps better than the official translation (and other answers),
- explain what you feel you did poorly.
三。 Votes: We upvote answers which uncover important lessons (particularly those useful to future readers).
I haven't completely thought this idea through, but I think I would enjoy participating, and I feel like I would learn from seeing other people's answers: they're facing the same challenge. It might also help identify hidden weaknesses.