Cantonese characters

[Lu]

In English we can say "starve" and have determined that it's a cognate of German "sterbe," but "sterbe" does not mean "starve," but "die." I don't know what the cognate of "die" is in German, but that of "death" is "Tod," used differently of course.

It gets even more fun if you include Dutch as well.

Eng - Dutch - Ger

starve - sterven (to die) - sterben (to die)

death - dood (dead, death) - Tod (death)

die - doden (to kill) - [don't know, my German is not that extensive]

to kill - kelen (to strangle)

to strangle - strengelen (to wind) [i think. I'm not a linguist]

to wind - winden [and here we finally arrive in the same place again]

 

Sorry for the tangent.

[Shelley]

To join in this slight deviation, starve in English is very often associated with death. It doesn't always lead to actual death but the meaning is implied.

 

Its often said " is there anything to eat? I am starving (to death) !

[somethingfunny]

I was going to start a new thread to ask a question, but figured I'd better check to see if it had been answered before, and came across this thread which gets pretty close.

 

What would be the difference between translating a written document from English (or any other language) into Mandarin or Cantonese?  My assumption is that it depends a lot on the type of document, so let's say it is a legal document.  

 

In other words, which of the following scenarios makes more sense:

 

Scenario 1

Lawyer A: We need these documents translated into Chinese.

Lawyer B: Do you want them in simplified or traditional characters?

 

Scenario 2

Lawyer A: We need these documents translated into Chinese.

Lawyer B: Do you want them in Mandarin or Cantonese?

 

Extra credit questions:  What if the legal document was something formal like a list of laws?  What if the legal document included witness testimony from a native Cantonese speaker?

[陳德聰]

What region is the “native Cantonese speaker” located in?

 

Your second scenario is what I encounter all the time and it’s a stupid question. I am currently doing a “translation” job that involves changing Simplified to Traditional, but the client has made it extremely difficult to just do it automatically and proofread for errors, because they don’t understand that Mandarin and Cantonese are not synonymous with Simplified and Traditional.

 

If the Cantonese speaker grew up using Simplified characters in Mainland China, the translation should be done by someone who uses Simplified Chinese characters and is familiar with what legal terms are used in Mainland China.

 

If the Cantonese speaker grew up in Hong Kong, the translation should be done by someone who uses Traditional Chinese characters and is familiar with what legal terms are used in Hong Kong.

 

No legal document will likely contain any of the colloquial Cantonese characters like 嘅 or 啲 unless perhaps in quoted speech?

[somethingfunny]

This came up when someone I know who works at a law firm had a disagreement with someone else about what the "two types of Chinese" were.  The law firm wanted documents translated into Chinese (I don't know why) and someone asked "Which kind of Chinese?" to which my friend replied "You mean simplified or traditional?" and his colleague said, "No, I mean Mandarin or Cantonese?"  So let's just assume we're dealing with a legal document written by an native English speaker.

 

 

25 minutes ago, 陳德聰 said:

Your second scenario is what I encounter all the time and it’s a stupid question. I am currently doing a “translation” job that involves changing Simplified to Traditional, but the client has made it extremely difficult to just do it automatically and proofread for errors, because they don’t understand that Mandarin and Cantonese are not synonymous with Simplified and Traditional.

 

In that case, why is it a stupid question?  Surely, if Mandarin and Cantonese are not synonymous with Simplified and Traditional, then asking whether you wanted a Mandarin Chinese translation or a Cantonese Chinese translation would be a most pertinent question.

[Flickserve]

11 hours ago, somethingfunny said:

asking whether you wanted a Mandarin Chinese translation or a Cantonese Chinese translation would be a most pertinent question.

 

No. The better question would be which legal system do you want to follow. A mainland legal system with its definitions or HK legal system. I am not a lawyer but formal Chinese wether traditional or simplified in HK is no different to chinese.

 

Cantonese is spoken and has Chinese characters which have been created. As far as I am aware, these Cantonese characters never appear in formal documents.

[Michaelyus]

Hong Kong's bureaucracy goes by the 兩文三語 principle (usually translated as "biliteracy and trilingualism"). This doesn't necessary exclude Cantonese characters, but they are viewed as a subset of 中文, and are thus used only where the "rest" of the Chinese character set will not suffice. Hence the HKSCS is a supplementary set of characters used when the "standard" ones do not suffice (e.g. in directly quoted speech notated as spoken).

 

I'm not sure whether this is an official legal policy, but de facto this is how things are done. I find referring to that phrase 兩文三語 can clear up confusion, and then get the client to move to localisation rather than simply translation. 

[dwq]

Quote

Do you want them in Mandarin or Cantonese?

 

The question is, when they say Cantonese here, do they really mean "Written forms of Chinese used in Hong Kong / Macau / other Cantonese speaking region"?  They are not what usually regarded as the same thing, and for a document, usually it is (one of) the latter that is wanted.

 

Michaelyus says it correctly that it is a localisation problem.  As you can see here, even "Mandarin" has at least 3 variations in terms used due to locale, not to mention other differences that matter to a translation, like difference in law systems for legal documents.

 

[dtcamero]

On 10/14/2015 at 7:15 PM, renzhe said:

Now, what you will find is that people from, e.g. Cantonese background, can read vernacular Chinese using a Cantonese pronunciation of the individual characters. This is essentially Mandarin grammar and vocabulary, but read using a Cantonese pronunciation. 

 

this was my original understanding of the way modern chinese is understood by people who speak other topolects... but the above wiki link on written cantonese seems to contradict:

 

"While the Mandarin form can in principle be read and spoken word for word in other Chinese varieties, its intelligibility to non-Mandarin speakers is poor to incomprehensible because of differences in idiom, grammar and usage. Modern Cantonese speakers have therefore developed their own written script, sometimes creating new characters for words that either do not exist or have been lost in standard Chinese."

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_characters

[Lu]

There are several different options. I'm going to paraphrase a very very old post I read here once and which I unfortunately cannot find now.

1) Mandarin text, read character for character in Cantonese pronunciation. This would result in understandable, but very stilted and unnatural language. This might happen if for example a Hongkonger reads an article from a Chinese newspaper.

2) Mandarin text, read in Cantonese pronunciation but paraphrased a bit to make it more natural. If I recall correctly, this is what newscasters would speak.

3) Spoken Cantonese written down. Meaning Cantonese grammar (which is related to but different from Mandarin grammar), Cantonese particles, Cantonese words, everything. You can write this but you would need the Cantonese character set. This is what you would use to send text messages to friends. (And perhaps there are all kinds of other texts in full written Cantonese? I have no idea.)

[ParkeNYU]

@Andrew78 @Michael H

There are subsets of Han characters specific to every Sinolect branch (including some Mandarin dialects!), but this does not make them different writing systems anymore than < ñ > and < ß > imply that Spanish and German, respectively, use different writing systems from Latin (itself eventually adding Y and Z from Greek) or English (which added < j/i > and < u/v > distinctions, not to mention < w > and formerly < þ > and < Ƿ >). Conversely, I would say that the relationship among Han characters (Hànzì/Hon3zi6/Kanji/Hanja/Hán tự), Chữ Nôm (Vietnamese characters), and Sawndip (Zhuang characters) is analogous to that among Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic (same ancestor but divergent). Characters usually used in Cantonese like 唔 and 嘅 are not invalid in Mandarin writing, but rather represent different sounds and meanings, often obscure or archaic. Still, inserting them wouldn't be considered an insertion of a different writing system.