Free Translation on the Internet

Summery: The prevalence of online free translation cannot be ignored nowadays. What is the consequence of this airblown giant outdoor adult cheap yard house buy for-sale wholsale air-blown commercial kid sale custom manufacturer chinaphenomenon, and why Chinese people take a keen interest in offering it.


As a translator with 8-year experience, I resort to the Net whenever I meet with an obstacle in translation. It’s not only because it’s an instant way to find out a suggestion, but also because of its high efficiency.

Obviously, the Net is becoming a universal medium, which provides an immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of free translation resource, which includes a rich bank of glossary. The perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking and translating, but the boon comes at a price. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1960s) pointed out media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the online free translation resource seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. The increasing reliance on the online free translation make my minds get used to the way the Net distributes information: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

The Internet has altered my mental habits when I work on a translation project. My concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lost the thread, and begin looking for something else to do. The contemplation that used to come naturally has become a struggle. My thinking has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way I quickly scans short passages of bilingual text from many free translation sources online.

I worried that a style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading and translation. In this airblown Inflatable Bouncemoney-worshipping world, academic excellence seems to have been relegated to a role of secondary importance. The translators, a kinds of intellectual, tend to become “mere decoders of information”, instead of weigh our words when we translate. And the hustling and bustling of routine life makes deep-reading and intensive study become a kind of luxury.