Tender Leaves Translation Courses

  • Duration

    3 hours

  • Tools

    Videos
    Transcripts
    Slides

  • Learners

    95+

  • Video

    1.5 hours

    100 Tips to Help You Translate Like a Native English Speaker

    Editor Susie Gordon offers 100 practical tips to help you translate like a native English speaker

    Why should I take this course?

    Get 100 top tips from an editor who has over a decade of experience editing non-native English.
    Learning a language well enough to be able to translate into it from your mother tongue is a huge achievement. Translators who are working with English as a second language have a different, extended skillset to those who translate into their mother tongue. It really is impressive.

    However, in the course of my work as an editor of texts translated into English by non-native speakers, specifically Chinese, I regularly come across quirks and idiosyncrasies that bog translations down, or don’t sound quite right, or may make things sound stilted. I started keeping a list of these quirks a little while ago, mainly as a sort of check list to work through when I receive a new translation to edit. Instead of keeping it to myself, I decided that sharing them might prove helpful to translators (and other editors).
    So, if you’re someone who doesn’t have English as a mother tongue, but translates into it, I hope this course will be useful. Caveat: it is not designed in any way to shame you! We all make mistakes, and often outdated educational material or bad teaching habits can engrain certain errors into the minds of young, impressionable translators into English. I’m here to undo those errors and give you the tools you need to translate like a native speaker.
    I’ve chosen 100 examples, and grouped them into 10 modules of 10. They are loosely themed, but don’t need to be worked through in any particular order. Remember: this is by no means a definitive inventory. It’s purely a running list I keep of issues that crop up regularly in the course of my work. Another caveat: although many of the points will be relevant to translators in general, a lot of the examples pertain to native Chinese speakers translating into English.

    Meet the instructor

    Susie Gordon

    Susie Gordon is an editor and writer based in the U.K. As a writer she has a broad range of experience across many fields, specialising in travel, business and culture. As an editor she has worked mainly in polishing content translated from Chinese to English, including editing the English translation of Fan Wen’s novel Land of Mercy for Rinchen Books, and the memoir of S. P. Tao. She is also a fiction writer and a poet, and has published two full-length poetry collections as well as essays and short stories. Susie serves as editor for Alluvium, the online journal of Literary Shanghai. Alluvium regularly publishes translations.