Almost finished with translation

For the last couple months, I have been really busy translating a book. The book is not very long, but it is, after all, book-length. I expected to learn a lot from the process, but the main thing I learned is that it takes a long time to translate a book when working only on evenings and weekends. It bugs me when people say they "learn" obvious things, like "bad things happen to good people," but I didn't quite grasp the fact that I needed to give up most leisure activities to get it finished in a reasonable time frame.

I had imagined that the most difficult part of translating would be to find natural ways of expressing the meaning of the Chinese in English. However, the most difficult and frustrating part of translating was dealing with logical inconsistencies, shifting subjects in sentences, and half-completed thoughts. Many of these problems might not bother you if you weren't reading the text too carefully, but I couldn't bring myself to duplicate the structures in English.

I'm pretty sure it was a gamble by the author to get the book translated. Unless the potential publishers are bilingual, they cannot decide whether to publish the book in English before the author has paid to have it translated. The author tried to translate it, but it was too rough to allow anyone to make a judgment about it. So I wish the author the best of luck in getting it published, and I wish myself to soon be able to reclaim my free time.