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tagged: chinese english translator, chinese translator, find hanyu for english, google wordtranslator, hanyu english translator, hanyu translator, Language, learn mandarin, moving to China, translate chinese, translate mandarin, translator internetChinese Translator for the Internet: One Quick, Accurate, Convenient and Free Method
Posted by Mike in Languages
Unfortunately for those of us who are without the ability to recognize thousands of Chinese characters, there is a large portion of the internet that we simply aren’t privy to. Any .com.cn website will likely look like gibberish and opening up a translation website for translation is too inconvenient and inaccurate.
Fortunately, there is a solution to Chinese translation for the internet. Not surprisingly, Google created it. This walk through will take you through my experience with Google WordTranslator in China.
Installing and Using Google WordTranslator to Translate Chinese Characters
- Go to http://www.google.com/toolbar/ff/index.html and download the Google Toolbar.
- Restart Firefox or Internet Explorer.
- Once added (if necessary), you will see the icon for translator. Make sure WordTranslator is checked as seen in the picture below to make sure that Chinese websites are translated properly. If you don’t see the translate button, click on the blue plus sign icon on the toolbar to add a button:
- Go to a website that shows Chinese characters.
- Push the “Translate” button that pops up at the top of your web browser as seen below.
- See the results! Optional – switch to automatically translate Chinese characters to English (or whatever language).
Added Benefit: Reverse Translation
If this tool wasn’t great enough, there is an added feature that allows you to hover over English words to translate to Chinese characters. To active this, go to the Toolbar options menu and edit settings under “Tools” so that you can translate English words to Simplified Chinese.
Once done, you simply have to hover over a word to see the translation. One note, as with all Chinese translations, nothing is perfect. Those who recognize Chinese characters will notice that the first character shown for “you” doesn’t mean “you”. However, the other characters do.
Conclusion
Upon using multiple translation programs, I came to the conclusion that the one offered by Google was the most accurate and easiest to use for translating Chinese on the internet. It can literally translate a Chinese website for you without you needing to press a button. There are other programs out there, but nothing I have found can compare to the offering of Google.
Can you think of a better program for translating Chinese websites? Leave a comment.
Nice post. I must admit that I prefer to use MDBG’s translator if the purpose is to learn as well as to translate – it gives a Google translation and then individual word lookups to let you understand the breakdown (including the Pinyin to read it). The character-by-character bit is useful if the translation is a bit mangled as the dictionary often has alternate translations that you can immediately spot as correct from context.
PopUpChinese’s news feed option is pretty useful too as it gives a bunch of articles in Chinese that have pop-ups with English and Pinyin when you hover your mouse over and the translations for proper nouns are pretty good (so if you want to learn geographic places it’s quite good).
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Doug — great recommendation. I personally use the “Quick Translator” plugin for Firefox for my Chinese characters to English translations since it is completely free. Unfortunately, this doesn’t give the pinyin translation that MDBG gives. In the future I may bite-the-bullet and pay the fee for MDBG.
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