Translating Children's Books

Translating: so many ways to say the same thing!

In 2024, I translated three children's books. These stories were about landmarks in Singapore's past that are no longer around today. I translated them from English to Chinese, and while it wasn't my first experience translating per se, it was still a learning experience.

For context, I grew up speaking and reading Chinese. It's my first language and as a child, my primary language. I didn't learn my ABCs until I was six years old, and even then, I had difficulty figuring out which direction the letters faced. I am very comfortable speaking Mandarin, and I have confidence in my grasp of the written.

Translation is an entirely different beast from speaking or writing. For one thing, the ideas on thepage were not mine, and I had to run them through my own mind before working out how to phrase them in Chinese that was also age-appropriate. There were a lot of false starts and reviewing on paper before I typed up my translations.

The New English-Chinese Dictionary

I'm really grateful to have friends who are professional translators. They taught me what tools they kept at hand and what tabs to have open on their browser to speed up the work. I found myself wishing I had an English-Chinese dictionary at hand oftentimes during the projects!

One minor peeve I had was having to keep tweaking the product. I don't like making edits, honestly. But I understood the need to be clear, particularly since the books were meant for kids and thus had to be easy to digest. It was a necessary process. I just didn't like it. Heck, I dislike editing my own writing most of the time, so this was more a case of my own aversion.

Another minor peeve was lead time. It is important to insist on having sufficient lead time and I'm glad I stood my ground, because I would rather take a little longer to make sure my part was delivered with as few errors as possible than to rush. I would advise this for everyone who does any project -- if you need a lead time, say so and insist on it. My collaborator was very understanding and took the brunt of any pushback, which I appreciate.

But through the exercise of translating, I was pleased that I was still pretty dang good at my mother tongue. Nowadays, I don't really write in it -- I'm much more fluent in English -- but having this opportunity to flex my bilingual brain muscles was really invaluable.

Would I take on future translation jobs? Perhaps only for children's books. I do not think my standard of Chinese is up to anything more challenging than that!