One hard cold fact about translating instructional material written in Chinese characters is this:
The characters may have a martial art meaning that is not in your every-day standard Chinese dictionary. So you may rejoice at finally finding a Chinese character in your Chinese dictionary, jot down the meaning, scratch your head for awhile trying to make sense of it in relation to the other characters you have translated so far, and finally quit in confusion and exasperation because nothing is making any sense.
ENTER: Andrea Falk who has written:
Chinese-English Dictionary for China's Martial Arts
Chinese-English Dictionary for China s Martial Arts www.thewushucentre.ca Andrea Falk
Now you are really onto something! Any idea or concept that is communicated in Chinese characters often takes more than one character to do the job. It may require several characters. Andrea has organized a dictionary to do this. Absolutely wonderful.
There is still another piece to this whole puzzle. Is there some way we can quickly get to the English language meaning of a character without counting the strokes or marks and then go digging in a paper book to find it?
There is a thing called a Quicktionary:
Store
You hold this amazing contraption in your hand, and with a steady hand, using silk-reeling learned from your Tai Chi practice (hopefully), scan a line of Chinese characters. You have to either buy the model with a Chinese dictionary pre-installed or install off their site. It will give you a character by character English definition. You can then use Andrea's dictionary, or another resource, to focus in on if there is a special meaning in the martial arts world for that character.
Another valuable resource is this dictionary by McGraw-Hill.
McGraw-Hill s Chinese Dictionary and Guide to 20 000 Essential Words A New Method for Non-Native Speakers to Look Up the 2 000 Most Commonly Used Characters in Chinese Quanyu Huang 9780071629249 Amazon.com Books
With these three resources, I have found effective translation can by achieved in Chinese texts that have martial meaning to the characters.
The characters may have a martial art meaning that is not in your every-day standard Chinese dictionary. So you may rejoice at finally finding a Chinese character in your Chinese dictionary, jot down the meaning, scratch your head for awhile trying to make sense of it in relation to the other characters you have translated so far, and finally quit in confusion and exasperation because nothing is making any sense.
ENTER: Andrea Falk who has written:
Chinese-English Dictionary for China's Martial Arts
Chinese-English Dictionary for China s Martial Arts www.thewushucentre.ca Andrea Falk
Now you are really onto something! Any idea or concept that is communicated in Chinese characters often takes more than one character to do the job. It may require several characters. Andrea has organized a dictionary to do this. Absolutely wonderful.
There is still another piece to this whole puzzle. Is there some way we can quickly get to the English language meaning of a character without counting the strokes or marks and then go digging in a paper book to find it?
There is a thing called a Quicktionary:
Store
You hold this amazing contraption in your hand, and with a steady hand, using silk-reeling learned from your Tai Chi practice (hopefully), scan a line of Chinese characters. You have to either buy the model with a Chinese dictionary pre-installed or install off their site. It will give you a character by character English definition. You can then use Andrea's dictionary, or another resource, to focus in on if there is a special meaning in the martial arts world for that character.
Another valuable resource is this dictionary by McGraw-Hill.
McGraw-Hill s Chinese Dictionary and Guide to 20 000 Essential Words A New Method for Non-Native Speakers to Look Up the 2 000 Most Commonly Used Characters in Chinese Quanyu Huang 9780071629249 Amazon.com Books
With these three resources, I have found effective translation can by achieved in Chinese texts that have martial meaning to the characters.