The Internet-assisted Chinese-English Translation

With a rapid development of the internet, many translators have become aware of the great power of the internet-assisted translation. When translating an excerpt from China's Population Aging and the Risk of "Middle Income Trap" from Chinese to English, I encountered many problems, such as the translation of proper nouns, terms, words with Chinese characteristics and long sentences with complex structures. Apart from that, the target language English is not my native language so I found the translation of the excerpt even more difficult. In order to solve these problems, I often turned to the internet for help. Based on that experience, this report intends to summarize what searching skills could be used in Chinese-English translation to solve different kinds of problems.First, this report groups the web searching skills put forward by several scholars into five categories, namely, direct searching, searching with helping words, searching for the meaning of words or sentences in ST, using parallel texts and evaluating the results through the internet. Then, based on my translation experience, I tried to summarize how the above-mentioned searching skills were used together and what kind of translation problems they could solve. Through analysis, I found when searching for simple linguistic information, the most direct and fastest way is to use the method of direct searching+ evaluating or searching with helping words+evaluating. If these two methods fail to provide good translations and if the translator also needs some background information, he or she can adopt the method of searching for the meaning of words or sentences in ST+ direct searching/searching with helping words/self-translation + evaluating. Lastly, when translating a passage with a concentration of translation problems which cannot be solved easily by direct searching, one may turn to parallel texts for useful expressions. I hope this case analysis can provide some suggestions for translators facing similar problems, helping them find accurate translations quickly by employing suitable searching skills.