5 ms·

Chinese: Simplified, Traditional, Mandarin or Cantonese (The Simple Answer)

28 points by robert_mygengo 16y ago

Schmelson 16y ago
Awesome; this question has been a thorn in my side for so long. It's great to get a clear picture of it!
pixelbeat 16y ago
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 http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi
wickedchicken 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.
wyuenho 16y ago
体 in tradition chinese should be 體. People transliterating from simplified to traditional always miss this one.
gaiusparx 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.
Open-Juicer 16y ago
>>>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 16y ago
  > 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 16y ago
    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.
yuan 16y ago
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.
xiaoma 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Above error has been fixed. Designer's error, not the author of the post :)
bane 16y ago
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 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 16y ago
  Mandarin has a lot of homophones (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...) 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 16y ago
    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.

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

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 http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi

wickedchicken 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.

wyuenho 16y ago

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

gaiusparx 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.

Open-Juicer 16y ago

>>>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 16y ago
> 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 16y ago
  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.

yuan 16y ago

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.

xiaoma 16y ago

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 16y ago
Above error has been fixed. Designer's error, not the author of the post :)

bane 16y ago

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 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 16y ago
Mandarin has a lot of homophones (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...) 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 16y ago
  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.