German playwright and poet Friedrich Schiller once said, “Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.” This saying reflected the complex relationship between the “easy part” and the “hard part” that we encounter when doing English to Chinese document translation, the two of which are interdependent with each other.
The “easy part” of doing English translation work is mostly decided by how familiar you are with the vocabularies. When you receive the document for Chinese translation, you can judge the difficulty of the article by the vocabularies you see at first glance. If there are numerous words that you are unfamiliar with, then the article would be deemed as “hard” for you; If they are all words that you already know, then it would be an “easy” article. A lot of people don’t like easy articles, as they think it does nothing to help them improve their techniques. However, if you could finish an easy Chinese document translation perfectly, then it should count as a victory for you. There are always things for us to learn, because even the easiest articles would include some of the most important sentence structures and grammar. On the other hand, when you are doing lots of easy translations, you would also be improving the speed of our translation. Next time when you encounter something hard, you would be able to knock the easy ones out in a short time, leaving more time to deal with the more complicated sentences.
Chinese document translation would always revolve around understanding the five basic sentence structure and grammar system. What is a compound sentence? Just a combination of some simple sentences that are long and hard, and makes you confused about which is the main clause. When dealing with such sentences, all we have to do is split it into multiple simple sentences by analyzing the sentence structure and dissect it one by one.