Category: Chinese language
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New Scientist reports that Nokia are going to launch a new phone which will be able to translate menus from Chinese to English. IF YOU think you are ordering ice cream from a foreign menu, you don’t want to end up asking for a plate of sheep’s eyes by mistake. A cameraphone Nokia plans to…
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The BBC reports (China dishes up menu translations) that the Beijing Tourism Bureau is trying to improve the English translations of restaurant menus in preparation for next year’s Olympics. Translations such as “virgin chicken” for a young chicken dish and “burnt lion’s head” for pork meatballs are confusing for foreigners, it says. [..] The names of many Chinese dishes have…
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Via DGNYHK, an interesting site for learning Chinese characters. You can download a small application that displays Chinese characters – just set it to display a new character every few seconds and be amazed at how many you (kinda, almost) recognize. Two more free sites: Cantonese lessons CLC Or for a laugh, paste Chinese text…
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We are all used to seeing signs in China with weird English translations from Chinese, but this one is a bit different. For this one (in a railway station) rather than attempting to translate into English, they have provided the Pinyin. Very helpful if you are trying to learn Chinese, I guess.. (Sorry about the…
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Have to agree with Paul over at The Valley on this one. A typical conversation between a Gweilo and a local in Hong Kong goes something like this: "yes, Cantonese is not easy. You should learn Mandarin – the tones are easier, and it’s much more useful". Say you were living in Hong Kong and…
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Spike over at Hongkie Town has an amusing story of the problems of trying to speak Cantonese. Not that it’s difficult to learn (though it is) but that most locals don’t expects a gweilo to be speaking it. So they are straining to understand what they think is English rather than listening to some imperfect…
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I expressed some surprise that a UK journalist wrote about Canton rather than Guangzhou, but someone has posted a comment defending that usage, saying that Guangzhou is too Mandarin. Well, maybe it is, but to a cloth-eared gweilo it doesn’t sound much different from Gwong Jau, which is the Cantonese version (I think). Either is…
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The letters page of the SCMP is currently running a debate about the pronounciation of the Cantonese word for “year”, following on from the way that it was written in English in SCMP’s centenary edition. Natasha Rogai (“Linguistic tide”, November 17) and Hugh Tyrwhitt-Drake (“Linguistic tyranny”, November 19) are wrong to have claimed that no…
Ordinary Gweilo 