Instructions : Aligned translations

Translations

Aligned English translations are provided for an increasing number of texts. Translations fall into two categories: 1) existing, complete published translations, and 2) translations created on ctext.org itself using a combination of AI and crowdsourcing. The first type cannot be edited, while the second can be edited either directly using the Wiki, or through the sentence-aligned view accessed together with dictionary lookup function ().

Example texts with AI-crowdsourced translations

Pre-Qin and Han

The vast majority of texts in the "pre-Qin and Han section" of the site now include either a published human translation, or an AI-crowdsourced translation. Examples of AI-crowdsourced translations in this section include:

Standard Histories

Other texts (selection)

For an up-to-date list, search for tag:ALIGNED_TRANSLATION.

Translation editing and style guide

Editable translations are currently a new and experimental feature of the site. As a result, for the time being please edit cautiously, and focus only on correcting obvious or straightforward mistakes in the literal translation.

General principles

Do not make systematic changes to address stylistic issues other than those included in this style guide.
Do not add any markup, commentary (except where present in the Chinese source text), context, calendar conversions or other information not present in the source.
Translations are designed to be read alongside the original Chinese text. Please do not add the Chinese terms directly to the translation, but use their translation (and/or transliteration into Pinyin) as necessary.
Please use Hanyu Pinyin without tones for transliteration of proper names.
Please use the text-and-translation editing interface wherever possible, rather than editing a translation directly.
By submitting or modifying any content you agree to the terms and conditions below.

Transliteration

When necessary (e.g. to translate a Chinese proper name), transliteration should always use the Hanyu Pinyin system without tones.
Spaces should be added between words, not between all syllables (Example: "王安石" => "Wang Anshi"; not "Wang an shi", "Wang An shi", etc.).
Proper names should have the first letter of each word capitalized (Example: "王安石" => "Wang Anshi"; not "Wang anshi", "wang anshi", etc.).

Notes and comments

Interpretative comments should not be added.
Translations should aim to provide a near-literal translation.
Translations are designed to be used together with the existing Chinese text; contextual information about proper names not present in the source text being translated should never be included (e.g. "王安石" => "Wang Anshi", not "Wang Anshi (influential philosopher, poet, and politician during the Song dynasty)") - please use semantic annotations and the Data wiki instead to record precisely sourced contextual information about entities.

Alignment

Texts and translations are aligned at the level of a paragraph (default display), as well as sentence (dictionary looking display). It is extremely important to maintain the validity of these alignments, as they facilitate verification of translation adequacy and faithfulness to the source text.
In the Chinese Text Project, a translation is treated as a separate text from the Chinese source text being translated. Both texts are stored in the Wiki section; the source and translation are connected through a combination of Wiki metadata tags and XML <seq> tags in both texts. Please do not modify, move, or delete any of these tags.
Alignment additionally relies on the chapter sequence numbers of both source text and translation corresponding. Please avoid renumbering chapters in texts that have translations; if these do need to be renumbered, make sure that identical numbering is maintained in the translated text.
It is strongly recommended to use the editing function availabile within the aligned view to edit translations.
Always aim to align to a granularity of at least one Chinese (punctuated) sentence. Alignments can also be made at a phrase granularity (i.e. a contiguous span of Chinese characters delimited by punctuation such as "，" or "；" - but not "、", "《", etc.), however only in cases where each aligned segment of the source text contains all of the content in the corresponding aligned segment.

Example: "無巧工、不巧工，皆以此五者為法。" must be aligned with "All artisans, whether skilled or unskilled, employ these five standards." and not subdivided, because the "All" at the beginning of the target text relies upon the "無巧工、不巧工，皆" at the start of the source text.

Copyright and terms of use

All translations in the Wiki section of the site are under copyright of the Chinese Text Project. Reproduction of these materials without permission is not allowed beyond the limited extent permitted by copyright law.
By contributing changes or additions to any translation through any of the available editing interfaces, you assert that these changes or additions are your own work, and agree to transfer irrevocably and without remuneration any copyright that may exist in them to the Chinese Text Project.
Users must not submit material copied from copyrighted translations unless the user themself is the copyright holder, and additionally agrees to the transfer of copyright described above.