Translation tools FAQ

How to view English translations

When new items are posted on this website, usually only the title and a short summary will be provided in English. You can still view a full English translation of the Chinese text following these two steps:

Select English in the dropdown menu under ‘Step 1: Show human translation’ in the toolbar on the right side of the screen. This will show translations of the Chinese text, as made by other visitors of China Energy Portal. If you then click ‘Set as default language’, this choice will be remembered.
Because it may take some time before the Chinese text is translated by visitors, some of the text will still be in Chinese. To translate the remaining Chinese text into English, you can use a number of different machine translators, including the Bing translate button provided under ‘Step 2: Machine translate the rest’. Other alternatives for machine translation are described here.
Note: many posts will have no, or only partial human translation. You will have to rely on machine translation for such posts.

How to help translate Chinese texts into English

Select English from the dropdown menu, then check ‘edit translation’:
Purple and green balloons will now appear in the text; () indicates a sentence has already been translated; () indicates a sentence has not been translated yet.

Click on any purple balloon, and the editing screen below will pop up:
Some Chinese sentences can be very long, with lots of comma’s. It’s okay to break these up into two or more sentences in your English translation.
Remember: if you would like to be acknowledged for your effort, make sure to log in so that your name is registered with the lines of text that you translate.
You can also contribute by providing an English summary of the main points of a text, see instructions here.
If you would like to help out, and do not have a strong preference for the subject area to focus your efforts on, then see some suggestions in the list of most wanted translations.
You can edit translations from previous visitors (where it shows a green balloon). Please only do so if there are obvious mistakes; focus on the untranslated parts.
When you see a piece has completely been translated, please send a notification by clicking the blue bar below each post.

Use of machine translators

Note: the human translations from Step 1 will always show, even if you switch these on after you switched on machine translation. There are a number of options to machine translate the rest:

Option 1: Bing Translate button:

Simplest: just click the translate button under ‘Step 2: Machine translate the rest’. Translations usually aren’t as good as those from Google translate, however.
Note that every other page you navigate to will also automatically be translated. That won’t stop until you close your browser. Just closing the China Energy Portal website is not enough.

Option 2: Use Google Chrome’s built-in translation:

Right-click anywhere on the page, then click ‘Translate to English’ in the menu that pops up.
You can tell Chrome to always translate Chinese webpages into English. After doing above step, or by clicking on the translate logo in the url bar (), the popup window below will appear. In it, click ‘options’, and set these as shown. In case this popup does not appear, follow the instructions provided here.

Option 3: Install the Google translate extension in your browser:

In Google Chrome: get the extension here. Click ‘Add to Chrome’. After installation, click the translate icon () in the top right of your screen, then click ‘Translate this page’.
In Firefox: get the extension here. Click ‘Add to Firefox’. After installation, click the translate icon () in the top right of your screen, or use the shortcut key (ctrl+F2); see also the options in the dropdown menu.
In Internet explorer: get the Google toolbar here. After installation, click on ‘more’ () to find the translate button. If you right-click on the translate button, you can pin the button on the toolbar.
In Edge: no support for Google translate extensions, only Bing/Microsoft Translator. Simply use the Bing Translate button provided under ‘Step 2: Machine translate the rest’; this will give the same results.

Option 4: Install the Baidu translate extension in your browser:

Get the extension for a number of different browsers here (under 下载翻译插件).
Installation instructions for chrome: download the extension here; press the button
Find the in your downloads folder, navigate to the extensions window in your browser (copy chrome://extensions/ in the address bar), and drag and drop the plugin from your downloads into this extensions window.
After installation, click the Baidu translate icon (), and then this button
In the bar that appears at the top, tell it to translate from Chinese to English:

Option 5: Browse the China Energy Portal in an online translation webpage:

Links for browsing China Energy Portal in translation webpages from Google (here), Bing (here), or Baidu (here).

Option ?: Google translate button:

Would be nice to have. There is such software, but unfortunately, having such a button slows down, or even prevents the page from being loaded properly, when accessed from China. It will be installed if and when Google services become available in China again.