Health & Fitness
Why a Teenager is Translating San Ramon Patch Into Chinese
Informing the Chinese community on what's going on in San Ramon with a little help from Patch.
I draw upon my own experiences as a child of first-generation Chinese immigrants to say that it's pretty difficult for them to get used to the English language — reading, writing and speaking. The older I grew, the more frequent they turned to me for English help.
"Hey Sal, I’m going to send an email over to you for correction."
"Sal! Are you allowed to say '[insert grammatically incorrect statement in here]'?"
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Believe me. I definitely sifted through my share of grammatical errors.
The seed of an idea was planted when I was talking to my mom sometime near the beginning of the school year. If I recall correctly, she was recommending that I read a Chinese book. Now, let me just say that reading Chinese books is like reading William Shakespeare without annotations. I can get the very general gist of what’s going on, but overall, it’s difficult to understand. Naturally, it'd put me off. When I made this fact known to my mom, she said, to my surprise, that she feels the same way about reading English books.
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It doesn’t take rocket scientist to put two and two together and figure that it’s most likely difficult for other first-generation Chinese parents to sift through English texts, too.
English texts. Which includes English news sites. Keeping up with big, world-wide news isn’t that big of an issue, as those are easily found on Chinese news sites. As far as I know, many don't tend to follow local news; not because of a general disinterest, but because the fact that they’re not comfortable with reading English. As a result, it might be more difficult for them to assimilate into the community than someone who is more fluent in said language.
Thus, Chinese Tomatoes was started as an attempt to bridge the gap between Chinese-speaking parents who aren’t as fluent in English and local news. What my cohorts and I are doing on this website is basically taking articles from the Patch website and writing Chinese abstracts of them, so as to:
A. Give them a general idea of what the article is about.
B. Possibly pique their interest in reading the article. And if "B" works, then...
C. Make their experience of reading the article a much more pleasant one.
Better knowledge of local news and community activities makes it easier for one to get involved; and that's what we want everybody to do.