What I want to say is that translation can't be learned just by learning translation. There are a lot of things to learn. If you do not work hard to lay a solid foundation such as reading a lot of Chinese and Western books and writing good essays, but just learn translation, you will never become a good translator. Translation, of course, can be done carelessly, but many problems can be found in the translation by the famous translators,and the translator will never stand out. It is not easy for translators to enable others to be sincerely convinced by and to appreciate their own translations.

And here is my additional remark regarding translators. There are some scholars who are competent in both Chinese and a foreign language, yet who are not competent in doing translation simply because they do not understand what translation really means and their remarks on translation is always off the mark. A translator, despite his/her good command of both languages, can make little progress without translating conscientiously a million words, “conscientiously” in the sense that he/she, while translating, should shrewdly detect and carefully compare the phenomena between and behind the two languages. It is not wrong to say that one can learn how to translate. But such a learning process could turn out to be a failure if the learner suffers a very poor foundation of both languages, and unable to write anything as a result. Even if this translation learner continues to translate for decades, the quality of his translation would, I am afraid, still remain disappointingly low. Therefore, anyone who is determined to become a first class translator has to lay a solid foundation linguistically and otherwise to begin with.