Translating short phrases often doesn’t seem to work in Chinese. I think the reason is that DeepL gets confused by LingQ’s word parsing: the automatic translation often seems to translate the words separately, frequently interspersing some kind of punctuation.
Here’s an example:
The phrase " 没有 什么 时间 观念" (literally: not-have what time concept) is translated by DeepL (and thus LingQ) as: “No, what? Time? Ideas?”*
By contrast, Google Translate ignores the spaces that LingQ puts between the words and translates much more appropriately: “No concept of time”
*notably, when manually deleting the spaces, DeepL translates correctly: “no sense of time”. But unfortunately, that is an after-the-fact fix; LingQ automatically provides the garbled translation above.
This seems to be another instance of what I think I’ve previously described as DeepL being “too clever by half” for use with LingQ’s concept - instead of giving a straightforward translation, it tries to come up with some way to make a sentence fragment into a full sentence. Great for translating longer bits of text, not suitable for translating bits and pieces the way LingQ requires.