I was the original editor and writer for this series: Interactive Chinese (meaning Chinese as a second language). Needless to say, we didn't have much of a market for the series in Taiwan. The textbook was sold all over Europe as well as the United States, Central America, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, India, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan.
One of the concerns I had as the writer and translator was to make the Chinese to English translations as exact as possible. My Taiwanese editors would complain, saying my work should simply be fluent. I knew, as a learner of Chinese as a second language, that the words in the translations should match up exactly. Adults learners want exact translations.
