It sounds weird but true that translation was something that I used to try to escape when I was at university. Time at university should be among the toughest periods in my life when I often found myself caught in the question where my comparative advantages lie and what I could do the best in comparison with other people. When it came to comparative advantage, English proficiency came across my mind more than once. (Actually, my English is not as good as lots of friends I knew at university. I really admire some of them for their effortless use of English when it comes to write English in a natural way) My first two part-time jobs that I took at university were English-related ones, i.e. English tutor and English translator. At that time, I just wondered what I could do other than teaching and translating.Further, that translation is subject to undervaluation by the market makes translation never be listed among jobs that I possibly take after graduating from university. However, even when I decided not to pursue translation as my career, I still have to cope with it in various life and work situations. A part of my work involves translating various legal documents written in Vietnamese into English and vice versa. Accordingly, what often irritates me during my work should be that the junior staffs submit careless piece of translation for my review. As far as I am concerned, it should be safe to state that translation is among effective measures to assess one’s diligence, logical thinking, background knowledge and of course, his language proficiency.
Translation is an arduous process. It was four years ago that I last finished my very first and only translation project and I spoke to myself more than once that perhaps I would not translate anything in the future. However, that reading more and more beautiful writings in English and Chinese just urges me to translate them in Vietnamese or Chinese (for writings in English). That’s the reason why I created this page with a view to challenging myself with this language game, lifting out the language barrier that limits audience’s access to good writings in different languages, and adding more colors to my blog in addition to my own writings.
Here comes the link to my translation project. By the time of this creation date (i.e. 2 January 2017), there is only one project available. I hope that this list would be longer in the future.
https://fragriver.wordpress.com/category/translation-work/
Fragriver 