English to Chinese and Chinese to English

Besides being a freelance translator, I am also a writer and teacher. Actually, I have authored and published several books on English grammar, composition, and conversation that, I can safely claim, have received wide acclaim and a pretty loyal core readership in my country Taiwan.

Before I became a full time writer and publisher, I was a freelance translator; and before I became a freelance translator, I worked in this country's then booming import and export industry. Since I worked mainly in the metalworking and electronics industries where the jobs often required me to write, often involving translation, industrial manuals and marketing material in both Chinese and English, I soon took to translation as a part-time job and hobby. As I have always been a self-taught literary writer since my childhood -- I seem to have inherited a lot of literary genes from my biological father and grandfather, particularly the later who was among the last and the greatest of a batch of anachronistic Tang-Sung style literati left by a 2000 year long tradition vanishing too soon in the early 20th century -- it was only natural for me to turn to full-time freelance translation when the country's general trading companies went to bust during the 1980's.

For such reasons, my translation experiences seem to be quite varied. In my nearly 25 years translation career I have done translation jobs for both publishing and industrial concerns. For the former, I have translated poems, fictions, works of literary criticism, textbooks of psychology, economics, and politics, trade books on marketing and industrial management etc., most of which being from English to Chinese, but with a few from Chinese to English, particularly short passages from Chinese classics; for the later, I have translated operation manuals, product catalogs, marketing leaflets, patent applications etc., for Taiwanese manufacturers of metal working machinery, plastic injection moldings, LCD screen panels, cell phones, medical equipment, and other IT products, with most of the jobs being from Chinese to English, but occasionally some from English to Chinese, if the fees were not too bad. My customers have all been quite happy with my service, for I have always tried to give their works something more than just decent translation. That is, aside from grammatical and syntactical decency, I always try to give my translated text a literary touch.

Of course, the trade of translation is a strange trade, for it is really not a trade, but many trades woven together and called one for the sake of convenience. No one can ever be well-learned enough as to be able to always produce single-handedly the result desired or demanded by his/her customers. This is particularly more so in today's rapidly changing world. We translators must work together in order to give our customers the best possible quality service. I welcome any person or organization interested in my service or interested in working with me to contact me. I can be reached at my website: www.yentzu.idv.tw and the following email addresses: [email protected] or [email protected].



I have translated more than 20 books and hundreds of industrial & commercial manuals, leaflets, catalogs, patents applications etc.,

My fees are: US$0.02 - $0.04 per source word for English to Chinese translation and US$0.08 - $0.20 per source word for Chinese to English translation, depending on length of text, quality of the source text's writing, and the quality of translation required etc., For those that rquire more than just plain and clear translation, i.e, materials that demand grammatical precision, syntactical beauty, and rhetorical ingenuity (or "the art of lying" as some may put it ^o^ ), etc., I normally have to charge higher for the extra time/effort input.