Monthly Archives: June 2010

Romanization Rumble: GR vs Pinyin

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A couple weeks ago Zrv issued this challenge to Pinyin-lovers:

As an interesting experiment, see if you can find a paragraph-long passage written in both GR [Gwoyeu Romatzyh] and pinyin.  Even if you don’t know GR well, I think you’ll find that just glancing over it, it looks much more like a real written language.

It sounded better to me than responding to clients’ emails, but I didn’t have a paragraph of GR handy. Then I remembered that someone out there had created a romanization converter.

Behold! Thanks to the nifty converter from Online Chinese Tools and a Pinyinified essay by 张靖和 [Zhāng Jìnghé] from Pinyin.info, we can all have a front row seat at the showdown: Continue reading →

Murakami’s 1Q84

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That’s “ichi-Q-hachi-yon”. The latest by Haruki Murakami 村上春樹 (Mandarin: cūn shàng chūn shù) has, much to my own disappointment, landed on my kitchen table. I say to my disappointment because he is one of my favourite writers, but the copy that we have is the Mandarin translation. As far as I know, there’s not yet an English one, and my Mandarin isn’t up to the kind of writing put out by Murakami.

Continue reading →

Mr. Who? The long, long tail of Chinese names

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I was schadenfreudically surprised the other day when a friend of mine, native Mandarin speaker, stopped short while reading through a list of teachers and asked her daughter: “Uh, what’s that teacher’s name?”

鄢老师！Yān Lǎoshī: Teacher Yān, of course!

One of the pleasant surprises in Chinese characters is how few surnames you have to learn, at least in the beginning. The common man isn’t called 老百姓 (lǎobǎixìng, roughly “old one hundred surnames”) for nothing. Heck, you can probably get away with a dozen, speedreading through business cards like, well, like nobody’s business: “Mr. Liu! Ms. Wang! Lawyer Zhang…”

But then the long tail hits. Continue reading →

Technical term translation

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For your summer translation fun, here’s a summary of comments from a recent post on how to translate technical terms from English to Mandarin.

To make it simpler, let’s assume “ABCD” is the English* term you want to translate. The suggestions are:

  1. Baidu search for ABCD
  2. Iciba search for ABCD
  3. Web search for ABCD along with a Chinese term that is used within the same general area of knowledge as ABCD (example)
  4. Web search for ABCD plus 翻译
  5. Web search for ABCD plus 英文怎么说
  6. Use a reganmian.net hack of the Chinese Wikipedia by going to http://reganmian.net/en-zh/ABCD (example)
  7. Use the Modern Chinese Scientific Terminologies site (thanks, Andre, in comments below)
  8. Google’s translation tool (thanks, Transliterationisms in comments)
  9. Google’s dictionary with bilingual features. Instructions: “Select a language pair at the top, then type in the word in either language, it auto-detects and responds appropriately.” (thanks again to Transliterationisms)

Thanks for all the useful tips. Did I miss anything?

Also, for the record, this post is now archived in Sinoglot’s brand new Language Tools, Tips, Resources page.

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*Anyone try these with a language other than English?

Three Fails: Handwriting, Punctuation, Alliteration

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There’s not really a fail theme, because there’s some serious stuff here too. But since I’m behind on linking to some great posts, and behind on work, here you go:

1. From Pinyin News, old Taiwanese dictionaries with nifty romanization now online, and a notice about handwriting input from Baidu, which I beat the shit out of with my favorite character.

Baidu Fail. [Consolation prize: at least it worked with a browser besides IE]

ceifail Continue reading →

May he live until he is urinating on his feet and defecating on his heels

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Since Sinoglot is “language in China, eclectically” with all of us here on the group blog doing some language/dialect-specific work on individual blogs, it makes sense to highlight some of what’s going on with those: Recently, we’ve got…

  1. The bad-ass Nisan Shaman saving Sergudai Fiyanggo from an untimely death: “May he live until the hair of his head becomes white, until the teeth of his mouth become yellow, until his back bends, until his eyes grow dim, until his legs are frozen in their tracks, and he is urinating on his feet and defecating on his heels!”
  2. Singing and Dancing in Wu, for when you need to number one or number two
  3. And of courseeat:

When “Chinese” Doesn’t Mean Mandarin

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The following is a guest post by Ty Lim, who served as president of Gaginang — a US-based nonprofit that promotes Teochew culture, language, and identity — from 2005 to 2009.

Outside of China proper, in cities around the world, what’s the lingua franca for communities of the Chinese diaspora? Your first instinct will be to say “Pshaw! In this globalized day and age, it certainly is Mandarin, 普通話, 國語, one people, one language bla bla bla.” This may be true for many cosmopolitan places such as Singapore, New York, and Paris but there are still many places where different dialects are the standard. Continue reading →

GR in UK, 1955

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Michael Rank has a fascinating review (h/t Danwei) of a book that’s now on my “buy when I go back to the US” list: Mandarin Blue: RAF Chinese Linguists in the Cold War.

I hope the book goes more into the difficulties of the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization for Chinese, because this may be the one time in history that a large number of people used GR (let me know if you know of others!). Here’s a quote

An idiosyncrasy of the course was that the Romanization used was the now obsolete Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR), which uses an ingenious if complex system of “tonal spelling” rather than accents or numerals to indicate the four tones of Mandarin Chinese. This makes the tone part of the syllable, as it were, rather than an added-on feature, but the system is time-consuming to learn and even some of the Chinese instructors had difficulties getting to grips with it. But the powers that be were so committed to GR that two American military textbooks were transcribed into GR specifically for the RAF course.

Anyone read it?

Cross-referencing “crosstabs”

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How do you find precise translations for technical terminology? One of the convenient things about dealing with a mainstream language like Mandarin is that pretty much every English technical or trade term in every subject you could imagine has a Mandarin equivalent.

The devil is in finding it. Bilingual dictionaries are good for mainstream stuff, but they don’t tend to include the lingo that’s an inevitable part of any profession. Continue reading →