The peculiarity of translating from English to Chinese

The peculiarity of translating from English to Chinese is the high complexity of the process. Specialists face a huge number of difficulties when dealing with journalistic texts. The translation of specialized literature, for example, of a medical or technical topic, is performed by top-class linguists or a group of authors.

The complete discrepancy between the means and methods of expressing thoughts greatly complicates the accurate conveyance of the meaning of the text or oral speech. One should not focus on the number of hieroglyphs, which account for over 87,000 characters. The vast majority of them are morphemes. It's not really that much. By comparison, the Oxford English Dictionary currently contains more than 470,000 words, i.e. 5 times more.

Comparing vocabulary helps us draw certain conclusions. If we assume that humanity as a whole, regardless of nationality and language affiliation, operates with the same number of concepts, and take English morphemes as a unit (1 word – 1 concept), then there are as many as 5 of them for 1 morpheme from Chinese.

Of course, the result is very conditional but practice shows that there is no fundamental error in it. Depending on the context, hieroglyphs may have up to four different meanings, so the spoken language of the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom is tonal, and there are not enough graphical means of display to cover all existing concepts. To be fair, it should be noted that there are many homonyms in English but there are an order of magnitude more homographs in Chinese. The context and the essence of the information being transmitted are extremely important, and not sometimes, not locally, as in other cases, but always. This is the main peculiarity to consider.