Summery: The prevalence of online free translation cannot be ignored nowadays. What is the consequence of this phenomenon, and why Chinese people take a keen interest in offering it.
As a translator with 8-year experience, I resort to the Net whenever I meet with an obstacle in translation. It’s not only because it’s an instant way to find out a suggestion, but also because of its high efficiency.
Obviously, the Net is becoming a universal medium, which provides an immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of free translation resource, which includes a rich bank of glossary. The perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking and translating, but the boon comes at a price. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1960s) pointed out media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the online free translation resource seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. The increasing reliance on the online free translation make my minds get used to the way the Net distributes information: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.
The Internet has altered my mental habits when I work on a translation project. My concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lost the thread, and begin looking for something else to do. The contemplation that used to come naturally has become a struggle. My thinking has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way I quickly scans short passages of bilingual text from many free translation sources online.
I worried that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading and translation. In this money-worshipping world, academic excellence seems to have been relegated to a role of secondary importance. The translators, a kind of intellectual, tend to become “mere decoders of information”, instead of weigh our words when we translate. And the hustling and bustling of routine life makes deep-reading and intensive study become a kind of luxury.
Just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its annual quantity of translation has shattered all precedents. Meanwhile with the emergenance of podcasts and blogs, the section of free translation on the Net cannot be ignored.
As we known, in 1960s, every Chinese followed Lei Feng to help each other voluntarily on March 5, the commemoration day. And Lei Feng was worshipped as a hero or even a god and millions of young people emulated his acts of generosity. And nowadays, even though China’s modern society has become much more self-centered, Lei Feng’s good deeds have not lost any luster to today’s what’s-in-it-for-me generation who knows Lei Feng from text books and class lectures. Some of language talents with passion translate materials for nothing and publish their works on the Net. Their goal of doing so is not for fame or fortune, but for the satisfaction of personal interests. The establishment of free translation circles provides a convenient and efficient means of communicating to develop their complex of Lei Feng.
The online free translation is not only in the form of text, but also in the form of subtitle. Many domestic movie website or BBS recruit language talents to translate the subtitle of latest movies abroad and published the version with Chinese subtitle before the opening of Hollywood blockbuster on the mainland. The competition is so fierce that website who merely has a lead of an hour will enjoy an overwhelming click rate.
