Translation review request—‘A-ba-ni-bi’
An Cat DubhExpert
Pending moderation
Can anyone make sure my translation here is OK? (Translator’s comments included.) I relied on double-checking Google Translate and Pleco, but my grammar is probably off, and I may have chosen an inappropriate synonym here and there.
And yes, the original Hebrew lyrics bear no resemblance to Harlem Yu’s lyrics. Unfortunately, while I can understand the general idea if I really apply myself, I don’t know enough Chinese to translate his version…
site activity
New translation
Russian → Bashkir
New collection
New comment
My first question is at what level do you know Chinese? Are you relying solely on the GT (and the other site you mentioned) output and modifying it (double-checking / proofreading) it?
I speak pretty good Japanese, so that helps with a lot of reading, and I’ve studied it to the point I can understand most of the signs at the Asian stores here, and I’ve held some basic written conversations in it. Granted, I am pretty rusty…
It's true that learning Japanese could assist you in translating Chinese, but there also some kanji which means totally different from Chinese characters. For example the character “酷” in Japanese is cruel, although in China we also use this character with other character to show the meaning of cruel (For example “冷酷”), but now we just describe someone who is very cool [which 酷(ku) have similar pronunciation to "cool"]
Also, "ㄨㄛˇㆠㄨㄛˇ", I think they only use this system in Taiwan. In Mainland China, we uses pinyin as our pronunciation system, and in Hong Kong and Macau, they uses their own system of pinyin, so maybe you could change to Chinese(Taiwan) if there's any option available on this website.
This line "ואת מה שהרגשנו באמת", I think it means about their true feelings, so you could translate to "而我们的真实情感“, which means how we really felt.
And here "אני חולם וקם שלוש מילים.", 睡梦 is a noun, the verb form is 做梦 or 梦到. There's a word in Mandarin Chinese which combines dreaming and wake up, which is 梦醒, so I think here you could change to ”梦醒后，这三个单词仍萦绕在我的脑海", which means after I woke up, those three words still stucks in my mine, but this is just my habit of making lyrics more poetic. :)
Thanks a bunch! I’ve made the corrections.
However, I decided to keep the zhuyin because pinyin is read [p] rather than [b], and also it kind-of breaks the Chinese text up. Also, the poetic translation feels not quite there: in the original, the ‘three words’ are a direct object, immersing oneself in them is something done actively.