Hi all,

I'm interested in people's opinion.. how many characters do people think you would need to know to be a translator of documents (Mandarin to English say)? Obviously this presumes other study reading etc. But I just wondered what a benchmark might be.

Merry Christmas everyone,

I would first say that the number of words you know is much more important than the number of characters. As for how many words you need to know, someone once estimated on this forum that you should know at least 6,000 words to translate. I am a translator, working mostly from French and Spanish but also occasionally from Chinese, so when I saw that post I made 6,000 words my long-term goal. I kind of thought that once I reached it I could stop my intensive study of Chinese and just kind of coast along from there. When I reached that goal, however, I definitely didn't feel like I was at a point where I could stop. I am now at 7276 words and 2952 characters, and I do feel increasingly confident in my Chinese skills. My new goal is to pass the HSK 6 exam, and once I finish studying all the HSK vocab I think (hope) I really will be in a position to start focusing on other things.

Depressing.

You need a lot of background knowledge as well as words, although of course you would get some of that along with the words - depending on what you're translating. I translate German legal texts into English and there is a lot of background knowledge about German history, politics and so on that help me make a decision on how to translate. Mind you, Chinese is so context-dependent that it probably needs more practice than Indo-European languages do.

This is always an interesting question for any language. I was wondering how many English words I know as a native speaker, and I'd struggle to put a number on it. But, in terms of words I use regularly, I'd suggest 5-6000 was maybe about right - but I don't know, for certain.

But, I know the word Antidisestablishmentarianism - which I mostly know becuase it is rather ridiculous as a word! I can't remember the last time I used it in conversation, or saw it in a newspaper or a book or a website. It's just one example of many words which I don't need on a daily basis.

I also know some words which are different words for the same thing. I'm thinking about what I (as a Brit) refer to as Americanisms. So, I can happily talk about a sidewalk rather than a pavement if I need to, or an elevator rather than a lift. I also know that Americans struggle with my use of fortnight (which is two weeks in case you don't know) and that I really shouldn't use the slang British word for a cigarette over there (fag) anymore than I should refer to a 'fanny pack' in the UK. But this doesn't mean I can't be understood, or understand. And all must add to my word count.

Right, time to stop waffling, but I just wanted to share my thoughts on it. And to bjnsharp - while is is partly depressing, it's also part of the fun of learning a langauage....

CC, I know antidisestablishmentarianimsm too, but you could translate that even if you didn't, using references. It's not so much the individual words (OK, I'm drifting - this thread is about numbers of words), but how to put them into English sentences, for instance knowing the style of a medical report or a newspaper, understanding the register of the Chinese. I know quite a lot of American terms, but I wouldn't offer to translate into American English, because there's more to it than sidewalks. I've translated stuff that American lawyers have understood, but I didn't claim to produce U.S. English.
While we're waffling: English has a huge vocabulary because of the Latin/French and Germanic elements: flower and bloom, for instance.

It depends. What do you want to translate? I translated junior high school speeches from Japanese into English without even being able to read the original by myself without outside assistance. This might have hindered the translation process a bit but the end result was fine. Afer I translated one speech, a girl brought it to her other English teacher and he said it was close to perfect.

Translation, especially between English and Chinese/Japanese, is an art. It's more than just acquiring words.

thanks for everyone's responses! 6,000 seems like a good benchmark junglegirl. congrats on getting to where you have done, very impressive! Also good point Zeppa.

I'm at basically the same numbers as junglegirl (7351 words, 2985 chars) and I think that even among the same number of chars/words known, skill will vary a lot. I feel like I would need to improve my reading speed a lot in order to get anywhere as a translator (which is what I'm now doing--practicing reading), whereas one who knows less characters and words but already reads all the time could do it faster. You'll be leaning on a dictionary, like Pleco, either way.

russell359 prepared an awesome word list

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=225706420

which is based on a large corpus of recorded conversations. You can download a spreadsheet of the 16,000+ words from:

http://mmc.sinica.edu.tw/resources_e_01.htm

The last column of the spreadsheet lists the accumulated frequency. If you knew the first 6,000 words on the list, you'd know 96.2112 % of the words used in the conversations. If you knew the first 7,276 words, you'd be up to 97.0829 %.

Just to self-reference Skritter on Skritter, here is an earlier link regarding translating.

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=218579030

And an even earlier one I started.

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=201071671


I also want to translate more in the future.