Yesterday, I received my first translation job! Needless to say, I was both ecstatic and a bit intimidated. On the one hand, this was an excellent opportunity for me to put my skills to good use. On the other hand, translation presents several challenges. Because my knowledge of Chinese is limited when it comes to more specialized vocabulary (e.g. bank jargon), translation from Chinese to English tends to take a lot longer than normal, since I have to grasp the meaning in Chinese first before I find the appropriate English words. Although this is relatively simple to do in everyday conversational Chinese, translating a legal document (an RMB Clearing Agreement, to be precise) is another story. The most frustrating obstacle is being able to read all the words written on the document but still remaining totally clueless about the content. In such cases, translation is difficult without the proper training. Moreover, I can hardly be called a veteran when it comes to Chinese-English translation. The first document I ever translated was a relatively lengthy environmental article for Green Earth Volunteers (GEV), the organization that I volunteered at last year. To this date, I still remember two particular details about that job: (1) It took me more than two days. (2) The finished English product was a hell of a lot longer than the Chinese original. At first, I thought that this discrepancy in length was purely a result of my inexperience, but I later discovered that Chinese just happens to be a more condensed language on paper.

I hesitate to use the term “efficient,” because I think it depends on how you look at it. In writing, you can certainly convey the same meaning in Chinese using less physical space, since you don’t have to put those annoying spaces between words (characters) :P. NowimagineifEnglishwerewrittenlikethat. I think I would go insane. Furthermore, let’s not forget that Chinese characters (Hanzi) are all uniform in height and width (at least in type). Although this is something that most Chinese people and students of Chinese take for granted, it is one aspect of the Chinese language that I have always found remarkable. When I was attending preschool in China, I remember being mesmerized by the writing booklets we received for our studies. The booklets were filled with little blocks that resembled the character 田.The blocks were printed in slightly faded ink to serve as a guide for our strokes. We were to practice writing characters in that book, with each character taking up exactly one block (田). I would finish writing one page and stop to admire how neat my characters were. Indeed, if you ever go to China, I recommend visiting a local elementary school and looking at the students’ writing samples. You will be amazed at how beautiful some of the writing is. Although handwriting is certainly a factor, I believe the beauty of the written Chinese language is a product of the innate aesthetic qualities of the characters themselves. But alas, that’s a topic for another day. Back to the efficiency of language:

For comparison, a single Chinese character in 12 point Song Ti takes up about the same space as a two-letter English word in 12 point Times New Roman. Considering that the vast majority of English words used on a daily basis are well over three letters, it comes as no surprise that Chinese characters take up less physical space. You may be tempted to conclude from this information that Chinese is clearly the more efficient language, but we need to take into account other factors. Although Chinese may take up less space on paper than English, when it comes down to writing the two languages, I’m tempted to give English the upper hand. But while it is possible to measure how quickly someone can write something, it isn’t practical to quantify something like legibility. For example, Person A writes a sentence in Chinese in 8 seconds and Person B writes the corresponding English sentence in 10 seconds. However, when the sentences are shown to subjects fluent in the respective languages, 95% of subjects indicated that the English sentence was “legible” (but to what degree is yet another variable), compared to 90% for the Chinese one. How can we conclude from this data which language is more efficient when it comes to writing? Furthermore, one major factor we can’t ignore is human variability. What if Person A just happens to write faster than Person B (i.e. A is able to move his hand faster)? The same problem shows up in typing, reading, and speaking. How can we take into account these discrepancies? One possible method is to hold the test subject constant, i.e., have just Person C undergo a series of reading, speaking, and writing tests in both Chinese and English. Of course, Person C would need to be bilingual. Again, though, there are problems. Valid test subjects can only be those who are equally fluent in both languages. That’s easier said than done. Chances are, most people, no matter how many languages they are fluent in, have a native or preferred language that they tend to be more proficient in. Furthermore, even if you were able to locate a select group of subjects who were equally proficient in both languages, it would be difficult to say anything conclusive about the data, due to such a small sampling size.

Despite these difficulties, I believe there is still a way of measuring the relative efficiency of the Chinese and English languages. The key is to approach the problem scientifically as we did when comparing the physical size of English words to Chinese characters. In measuring the speed in which the two languages can be written, we might begin by counting the total number of brush strokes required to make each character/letter. The reasoning, of course, is that characters or words with more strokes take longer to write. Let’s take the English word “I” and its Chinese counterpart “我,” for example. “I” takes three strokes to write (or one, for many people), while “我” requires seven. In this case, it seems reasonable to conclude that one can write “I” faster than “我,” since the former requires less than half the number of brush strokes as the latter. In this manner, we can continue our analysis to encompass words, phrases, and eventually entire sentences. The number of strokes required for a word or phrase is simply the sum of all the strokes required to make its individual parts (i.e. letters/characters). For example, the word “his” requires 5 strokes (two each for “h” and “i,” one for “s”), while its corresponding Chinese phrase “他的” requires 13 (5 for “他” and 8 for “的”). If we repeat this process for the 2000 most commonly used English words (as well as vice-verse, although the results may overlap significantly) and calculate the average number of strokes per word/character for both English and Chinese, we can get a good sense of which language is more efficient in this regard. For speaking, we can employ a similar system: counting syllables. For example, “hello” and “你好” have the same number of syllables, while “tomorrow” has one more syllable than “明天.” The word “pen” has two less syllables than its Chinese counterpart “圆珠笔.” (You might notice quite quickly that every Chinese character is monosyllabic.) As with writing, we repeat this process for the 2000 most commonly used English words (as well as vice-verse) and calculate the average number of syllables per word/phrase in order to gauge the efficiency of the two languages in speech. The only place where this method seems to fall apart is with reading. By extension of previous examples, one may hypothesize that longer words take longer to read than shorter ones, but is this necessarily true? If we define reading as simply the act of processing written language, then in English, we process things word by word, not letter by letter (unless it’s a word we do not recognize, in which case we tend to proceed syllable by syllable). This way of handling information applies even more so to Chinese. Indeed, we do nor read Chinese stroke for stroke, but rather character by character. Moreover, there are many character phrases (two or more characters) in Chinese that are used so often that I suspect the brain processes these phrases as single bits of information (i.e. as individual “words”). For example, our original hypothesis states that the English word “milk” will take shorter to read than “牛奶,” it’s Chinese counterpart. But if “牛奶” is processed as a single word, then this won’t be the case. At the end of the day, it all comes down to how visual information is processed in the brain. However, while I’m no neurologist, I do believe that the process of reading is related closely to speech. Indeed, when we are reading something, we are actually saying the words aloud in our heads, although we may not be aware of it. When we first started to read as kids, we all began by reading out loud. In fact, that is how we learn our vocabulary. When we are reading and stumble upon an unknown word, the first thing we do is attempt to pronounce the word. Thus, being able to say the word is the first step to knowing a word even before we understand its meaning. The next time we see that same word, we will involuntarily say the word in our mind before connecting it to its definition. In this sense, reading is a silent/unconscious form of speech. It follows that we can apply the same method to measure the “reading efficiency” of a particular language as we do to test its “spoken efficiency,” viz., by counting syllables. However, I still believe that composite words, such as “牛奶,” count for slightly less than the sum of their individual parts…

Anyway, if all this sounds a little too complicated or ridiculous, then it probably is :P. I guess I just have a tendency to explore random theories once in a while. However, if I ever have the time, I think I would definitely be interested in doing some language efficiency analysis using the “syllable method” outlined above. It doesn’t seem particularly difficult, especially if databases of commonly used English and Chinese words are already available in electronic form. I guess the only other thought in my mind at the moment is that maybe I was once a linguist in another life.