Translating is not easy, yeah… I did say that, but if you really want to start translating, there’s nothing to stop you if you can at least speak the language. It is quite common for Chinese who live outside the Mainland to not be able to read Chinese, it’s normal, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of.
I mean, I am among those “foreigners” who can’t read Chinese. I started my translating career due to an impulse to read ahead of a web novel I was following a few years back. I wasn’t able to read, so I decided to translate them to English instead, by using nothing but audio. I would copy the Chinese text and paste them into Google Translate, play the audio over and over until I get the meaning, then I will translate them into English.
After doing that for a few months, I then moved on to use online dictionaries and read the pinyin instead. I’ve been doing that for years and am still translating with the help of online dictionaries. I can now read more Chinese characters than before I started translating, but I still found reading the pinyin to be easier.
Click the link below to start reading:
