

Chinese: Simplified, Traditional, Mandarin or Cantonese (The Simple Answer) - robert_mygengo
http://mygengo.com/talk/blog/chinese-translations-simplified-traditional-mandarin-cantonese/

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Open-Juicer
>>>So, in an effort to boost literacy, the People's Republic of China
attempted to make learning characters easier through a series of
simplification rounds that took place between the 1950s and 1970s<<<

The fact is that people in Hong Kong and Taiwan have a much higher literacy
rate than those in mainland China, yet they use Traditional Chinese.
Mainlanders' low literacy rate is mainly a sign of lacking education, not
Traditional Chinese being a barrier to literacy. Moreover, in a digital world,
they make no difference in input speed.

What Hong-Kongers and Taiwanese are opposing to is not the communist
simplifying Chinese Characters, but simplifying them in an ugly fashion. In
most cases, it breaks the consistency in word formation as seen in Traditional
Chinese. In other cases, it's not aesthetic and even absurd. There is a joke
saying that the word factory(廠)in simplified Chinese (厂) explains why
factories in mainland China are subject to collapse.

Speaking of economics, simplified Chinese indeed appeals to larger potential
customers. However, PRC put lots of restrictions on foreign corporations.
That's why even Google and Facebook failed to (and will continue to) dominate
in China. On the other side, Hong Kong and Taiwan have the goodies of free
markets.

~~~
est
> Moreover, in a digital world, they make no difference in input speed.

On the other hand, traditional Chinese on a <4 inch screen always PITA to read
because every fucking single character looks like a black block, for example
龍, it's very hard to see the exact strokes which cause an obstacle for
reading. (yeah, like 赢羸蠃嬴 are totally 4 different characters.) Traditional
Chinese under 12px is simply un-readable on LCD screens.

The retina display on iPhone4 is good news for traditional Chinese.

~~~
Open-Juicer
Chinese words being displayed incorrectly is based on a false assumption.

On Twitter, 140 Characters mean a lot in Chinese! why? In Chinese, almost
every character is a word; In English, every character is just an alphabet,
not a word, with minor exceptions of course. Chinese words are square blocks
whereas English ones rectangle blocks. They shouldn't be of the same height.

I would argue that Chinese words convey more meaning per cm square. The same
square space occupied by 5 rectangle capital alphabets is more than enough to
display any Chinese character correctly.

BTW, you don't need to recognize every stroke to be able to identify a Chinese
word. You can tell by its pictorial pattern, such as negative spaces.

~~~
jhugg
I've always been super jealous at how much Chinese speakers can say in Chinese
on Twitter.

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gaiusparx
I think the article is not a good summary. For translation work for written
products, web, apps etc you need to do both Simplified and Traditional.
Traditional is used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, with the rest of the world follow
China's standard use of Simplified.

For spoken language, Mandarin is the standard, the official one. The rest of
spoken languages such as Cantonese, Hokkien etc are dialects depending on your
province in China and community.

If it is the first time you are learning about Chinese languages, learn
Mandarin and Simplified/Tradition written language.

~~~
robert_mygengo
I don't think this is the point.

You may wish to offer both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, but that's a
choice — and the article is clearing up the confusion that most non-Chinese
have about which relates to which nations.

~~~
quant18
Forgive me but this article seems to generate more confusion than it clears
up. Statements like _Cantonese and Mandarin speakers both use one of the
writing systems mentioned above, and on paper, the languages can look quite
similar_ are quite inept. Except a few subject matters (that do NOT get sent
through five-cent-per-word web services --- like advertising slogans and
written instructions for verbal Miranda warning-equivalents), clients NEVER
need translations into Written Cantonese. They need translations into Standard
Written Chinese.

Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Mainland all write in Standard Written Chinese.
Hong Kongers do not expect to see Cantonese in materials translated from a
foreign original, and largely do not want to. HK/TW/CN have a few vocabulary
differences (e.g. "taxi" is HK's "dishi", TW's "jichengche", and CN's
"chuzuche"). Orthogonal to the vocabulary differences, HK and TW use
Traditional characters, SG and ZH use Simplified. But I can write "chuzuche"
in Traditional, or "jichengche" in Simplified. They still mean the same thing
and are still understandable to all.

 _While we hope to offer translations into Traditional Chinese by Cantonese
speakers in the future, currently our translations are not ideal if you hope
to sell your product in Hong Kong._

Traditional to Simplified mapping is perfectly surjective. That is to say, it
can be done by computer with 100% accuracy. Having a Traditional Chinese and a
Simplified Chinese version of a document does NOT require two separate
translations from the source document, as you seem to be implying.

Let me draw an analogy, Britain says "boot" and "bonnet" and "bobby" where
America says "trunk" and "hood" and "cop". That does not mean everyone needs
to get separate British English and American English translations, nor
separate Taiwan Chinese and Singapore Chinese translations. In one extreme, if
I were a high volume group-buying website looking to expand globally, yes of
course I want the whole interface and the terms and conditions done up
separately for each English and for each Chinese. In the other extreme, if I
ran a boutique hotel and just wanted to give my Chinese customers directions
from the airport to my doorstep, I have no need for separate translations.

In between is a giant grey area where full-service Language Service Providers
generally try to provide some guidance to their clients. As a low-cost LSP
maybe you are not aiming at the kind of client who needs this kind of guidance
--- in which case you shouldn't be purporting to offer it. You should define
yourself clearly.

~~~
ch1rish
You make some good points, but I think the rule of thumb the article brings up
still holds true: "choose translators located in the region you are marketing
your product in." Yes, Traditional to Simplified mapping can be done easily by
computer(the article actually provides a link to a site that does this for
free), and yes, despite regional vocabulary differences for words like taxi,
all words can be written in Traditional or Simplified and be largely
understood by all of those in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland. The article
could have done a better job explaining this, and sometimes simply
understanding is good enough.

That said, the article really has non Chinese speakers marketing their product
in China in mind, and just as if I were marketing my product in the U.K. I
would want British spellings, I would want local words to be used if I were
marketing my product to a specific Chinese locale. And, in my opinion, the
difference in vocabularies between HK/TW/CN are arguably greater than the
English vocabulary differences between UK and the US. Simply put, if I were
marketing my product to Hong Kong, I would not want to pay even $.05/word for
a translation of a product description if I knew it was done by a Mandarin
speaker from Beijing who was not versed in the regional differences, and had
only converted the text from Simplified to Traditional. I think this holds
true for both small boutique hotels, and "high volume group-buying websites."

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pixelbeat
For techies, the font is also an important decision. With Han typography we
have:

    
    
        Song(CN)/Ming(TW)/Mincho(JP) ≍ Serif
        Hei(CN)/Gothic(JP) ≍ Sans
        Kai ≍ Script
    

Personally I use WenQuanYi Zen Hei <http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi>

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yuan
Contrary to what the simplified/traditional categorisation might suggest,
there is nothing non-traditional about the simplification scheme. Most, if not
all, of the simplified characters are taken from existing forms, such as those
used in cursive script(草书, aka grass script, cao style) and variants used in
certain eras/regions which happen to be simpler in forms. There had being
painstaking and rigorous process to validate established usage before any
character was approved for inclusion, in order to ensure the coherency and
continuity of the whole writing system. During the cultural revolution, there
was an effort for further simplification, and in the revolutionary zest, the
process was not so rigorous and many poorly designed and indeed ugly forms
were invented and included. Thankfully, these late additions were later
repealed and are no longer in use.

There was (or still is, politically motivated, I think) opposition to the
simplification in Taiwan, but fortunately pragmaticism prevails and nowadays,
even the current President Ma Ying-jeou advocates "识繁写简" (recognize complex,
write simplified), because the practicality of the simplified version is
undeniable.

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xiaoma
I'd be very wary of paying any translator who messes up simple translations
that they put into marketing materials. This is how the phrase "traditional
characters" is written in each script:

(written in traditional): 繁體字 (written in simplified): 繁体字

Also, the bit about traditional characters being harder to learn reads like
propaganda. Traditional character-using areas have higher literacy rates.
Also, my own personal experience as a language learner has been that
traditional takes longer to write, but it's more systematic in its structure
and it's much easier to read.

One further thing worth pointing out is that mainlanders read traditional
characters far better than Taiwanese and overseas Chinese read simplified.

~~~
robert_mygengo
Above error has been fixed. Designer's error, not the author of the post :)

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bane
_the People's Republic of China attempted to make learning characters easier
through a series of simplification rounds that took place between the 1950s
and 1970s._

And somehow they missed a far better target of Zhuyin Fuhao.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo>

It would have not only vastly simplified the written language problem in
China, but forced the nation to standardize on Mandarin as the spoken tongue
(with the benefit of a standard pronunciation!)

~~~
wickedchicken
Mandarin has a lot of homophones (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-
Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-
Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den)) so it's tough to claim a purely phonetic system
is 'far better.' It certainly has advantages, but the issue is not as clear
cut as, say, arabic numerals vs. roman.

~~~
bane
I remember seeing a proposal years ago that dealt with that problem by
producing a standardized listing of Chinese homophones, numbered and ordered.
In Pin Yin or Bopomofo one could clarify a homophone with a simple numeric
subscript that somebody could simply look up in a dictionary. Most of the time
you could leave them off and just rely on context. It had applications outside
of China as well for countries with large Sino-loan word lexicons like Korean
(a language which deals with the homophone problem routinely but has no
standardized system for sorting it out without putting the Chinese root in
parens).

Most of the homophones are sorted out with the tonal marks anyways, and in
cases where that doesn't clarify enough, there's usually less than 9
homophones anyways making a single numeric subscript a reasonable clarifier.

------
wickedchicken
I was learning Mandarin/simplified for a while and it took me some time to
identify whether I should be listening in on a conversation or reading a sign
or not. I don't have a good guide on Canto/Mandarin (it doesn't help that many
phrases sound similar in both to a Western ear) but for writing I zeroed in on
identifying the 'i' on the left side of simplified 'shuo' (说) versus the
'stack of pancakes' in traditional shuo (說). Since the 'i' appears frequently
enough in characters in signs, I found it to be a pretty good signifier that
what I was looking at was simplified.

~~~
wickedchicken
Also, the article doesn't mention that native speakers (especially ones born
recently) are often able to speak or read some part of the 'other' language.
It's a similar situation to French Swiss knowing some German and vice-versa.

~~~
sunqiang
I am a native speaker(not born recently though). it still hard to speak or
listen 'other' dialect, but more and more Mainland Chinese Speak mandarin
instead of dialect， so it's more and more easy to communication.

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wyuenho
体 in tradition chinese should be 體. People transliterating from simplified to
traditional always miss this one.

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Schmelson
Awesome; this question has been a thorn in my side for so long. It's great to
get a clear picture of it!

