Cantonese, as the language of Chinese settlements
in North America and elsewhere, is the dialect that is best known
in the United States. Mandarin, as the official language of the
People's Republic of China and Taiwan and as one of the official
languages of Singapore, is the most widespread of the dialects.
The vast majority of the Chinese-speaking population is in China
(more than 980 million), Hong Kong, and Taiwan (19 million), but
substantial numbers are also found throughout the whole of southeast
Asia, especially in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.
Important Chinese-speaking communities are also found in many other
parts of the world, especially in Europe, North and South America
and the Hawaiian Islands.
Two written forms - traditional
and simplified Chinese Chinese is written with thousands of distinctive characters
called ideographs. These characters consist of two elements -a signific,
which indicates the meaning of a word, and a phonetic, which indicates
the sound.
About 40 years ago the new government of the People's Republic of
China (PRC) made the decision to simplify the written Chinese language
to make it easier for the general populace to become literate. Thus
two distinct versions of written Chinese came into being - traditional
and simplified Chinese. These are easy for the native speaker to
tell apart.
Simplified characters are used
in the PRC and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are
used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.
The simplified writing system differs in two ways from the traditional
writing system: (1) a reduction of the number of strokes per character
and (2) a reduction of the number of characters in common use (two
different characters are now written with the same character).
Simplified Chinese
Traditional Chinese
"Horse" in English,
contains 3 stokes
"Horse" written in CHT
contains 9 stokes.
(simplified characters in red):
Although simplified and traditional
Chinese are only variations of written Chinese, it is not unusual
to find that those who read only traditional Chinese cannot
understand simplified Chinese, and vice versa. Therefore, it
is important in Chinese translation to determine whether simplified
or traditional Chinese should be used for a particular target
market.
There are no differences between the basic vocabularies
or grammatical structures of simplified and traditional Chinese.
However, due to the limited communication between mainland China
(using simplified Chinese) and Taiwan, Hong Kong and the overseas
areas (using traditional Chinese), there are some differences in
terminology, especially new cultural or technological nouns. For
instance, the English computer phrase "open a file" is
commonly translated in simplified Chinese as , while in traditional
Chinese it is .
What is the difference between
Cantonese and Mandarin? How are they related to traditional Chinese
and simplified Chinese?
Mandarin is the main Chinese language. Cantonese is one of the Chinese
dialects. In mainland China and Taiwan, most people can speak Mandarin,
while Cantonese is only spoken in China's Guangdong Province and
Hong Kong. Cantonese is more popular among overseas Chinese because
most Chinese immigrants in North America come form Guangdong and
Hong Kong.
It should be noticed that the
Chinese character reform is only related to the transcription
of Chinese, not the language itself. That is to say, traditional
and simplified Chinese are only variations of the written forms,
whereas Mandarin and Cantonese are related to its spoken form.
They should not be confused, that is, Mandarin is not the same
thing as simplified Chinese.
Coding systems for Chinese
documents
One of the problems in Chinese computing is the variety of internal
encodings that can be used to represent Chinese characters. The
most common of these are Guobiao (abbrev., GB) and Big5 or Big-5.
Guobiao orGuojia Biaozhun Ma
(..) the National Standard of the People's Republic of China,
is the encoding method for written simplified characters.
Big5 or Big-5 or Dawu Ma (..) is the encoding method for written
traditional Characters.
Both the GB and BIG5 encoding systems are used for
computers in China. GB has been developed by Mainland China and
BIG5 by Taiwan.
Is it possible to convert files between the GB and BIG5 encoding
systems?
A computer with a traditional Chinese Windows system can recognise
only traditional Chinese files written with BIG5 code. It cannot
show simplified Chinese files correctly which use GB code. As a
consequence, programmers have had to develop softwars that are able
to convert between the BIG5 and GB encoding systems.
However, such conversions can meet only the needs of individual
readings. They cannot be relied on for formal files in business
and technology. There are several reasons for this. First, the vocabulary
in the two lexical corpuses does not have one-to-one correspondence
- that is, one simplified character may correspond with multiple
traditional ones. Thus, the conversion should be corrected manually.
Second, the standard of choosing characters is not the same for
the two writing systems. Some rare characters can be recognised
by only one of the encoding systems. Third, the terminology of certain
fields and the translation of foreign Lexis are to some extent different
in the two writing systems. No software can perform such a transformation.
Converting flies from one encoding system to the other requires
almost the same amount of work as does conventional proofreading
of translation.
How do we determine which
version of written Chinese is appropriate for our clients' target
market?
If the target audience is in
mainland China, translations will be rendered either in simplified
Chinese or the GB encoding system. If the target market is a
region outside of the Chinese mainland, traditional Chinese
and the BIG5 encoding system will be used.
If the translation needs to be colloquial - for instance,
translating a training handbook for salesmen - the process becomes
more complex, because the language habits of different regions have
to be taken into consideration. For example, the word 'stamp' should
be translated as if the target market is the Chinese mainland or
Taiwan. However, in Chinese communities in North America, it is
often translated as , which resembles its English pronunciation.
Consequently, translated documents must employ the language customs
and styles of the target market --- this is true for translations
into Chinese as well as into English (such as American English,
British English, or Australian English.)
