I'm self-studying NPCR-3 and am finding it frustrating that the textbook is very stingy in giving colloquial English translations of sentences containing new grammatical structures. "A Practical Chinese Grammar" is very generous in providing translations, but it doesn't track with NPCR.

Has anyone found a Web site that would welcome occasional queries requesting help in translating specific sentences? (Google Translate does not do the trick.) Thanks.

You could try http://www.cucumis.org/ but there doesn't seem to be much activity there. Or you could sign up for an account on www.lingq.com, then go to the exchange page and make a request. I haven't used the site much yet, but I think people there are usually willing to lend a hand because they can earn points that they can then spend on language lessons.

Thank you for referring me to these Websites. I hadn't heard of them before and am look
ing forward to checking them out.

No problem! My husband started using LingQ about a month ago and really likes it. I'm thinking about signing up for a basic account myself when I have some more time to spend on language study. But I think even with a free account you can still request translations.

I have asked a few questions like this on italki and have got lots of responses. Many from native chinese speakers.

Do you trust translations? I don't. Something is lost or distorted when you get past the very basics. You need to teach yourself how to think in Chinese.

You can't completely trust anything. Obviously computer based translation isn't very reliable, especially with Chinese. Other foreign learners are not reliable without knowing how good there Chinese is. Native speakers are always best, but even then I have had conflicting translations and in any language, even native speakers frequently make mistakes.

I would argue that even most native speakers would be useless in this situation.

Chase Insteadman says it best,

"All language seems this way," "a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I'm helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don't. And yet I go around forming sentences."

Most people use language in this way: they copy what they hear without understanding why. It's how I learn Japanese; I copy, then repeat.

Translation, at best, is merely an artistic rendition.

I'd say translations have their place - without translations, learning nuances/usage takes multiple times longer. Lack of translations is one (among others) of NPCR's major defects. Does IC have translations?