If you’re trying to talk about adoption with your kid through a translator, be aware that the word adopt does NOT ever come through correctly on Google Translate. It ALWAYS comes through with words that mean “to adopt a course of action” or something like that. The word that means “to adopt a child” is pronounced show-yang, and it’s written 收養.
Google Translate doesn’t even have a definition for it.
The fun of this is that I knew I’d told our teen that our other two daughters are adopted, but of course didn’t know that the translator wasn’t delivering my meaning. So after looking through family photo albums last night, she asked to see pictures of my pregnancy with the girls. We worked back and forth until I finally got the correct Mandarin for “adopted,” and the look on her face when she realized what I was saying was AWESOME! She was thrilled to realize that her sisters were adopted too!
My favorite part was, after all kinds of questions like what their original names were and why we chose to adopt, etc, she asked me what part of China they were adopted from.
My other daughters are both white, and one even has blonde hair and blue eyes.