8 ms·

Taiwanese here. I have a mixed opinion about this site. Some of them are just weird: - mega → 巨型 (百萬) Really? Do you really want to translate mega to 百萬 (mill

Taiwanese here. I have a mixed opinion about this site. Some of them are just weird: - mega → 巨型 (百萬) Really? Do you really want to translate mega to 百萬 (million) in every context? *Edit: every, not any - text → 文本 (文字) Seriously? 文本 is the formal, academic way to say it, even in Taiwan. Have this person never been any academic environment? - through → 通過 (透過) Seriously???

Sniffnoy 3y ago
> Really? Do you really want to translate mega to 百萬 (million) in any context? Would its use as a metric prefix not be a correct context for this?
- raincole 3y ago
  My point is this site doesn't provide any context. It's very weird to say "mega should be translated to 兆/百萬/超級/巨型" without specifying the context first. A Reddit "megathread" is definitely not a 百萬討論串. *Edit: my word choice was wrong in the parent comment. I meant to say "every context", not "any context".
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Literal translations often have that problem, and even human translators need context. The initial comment looked like there wasn't any context, which means "mega" could just as easily mean «SI million prefix» as «huge». In written English, the word "minute" in isolation and without context may be the noun for the time period of 60 seconds, or it may be the adjective «very small».
    - jachee 3y ago
      And even if it is representing a moment of time, it may not be representing exactly sixty seconds. It could in fact be an idiom representing an indeterminate longer interval: This particular usage has been around, colloquially, for a minute.
  - Sniffnoy 3y ago
    Ah, I see.
- jeffchien 3y ago
  Slightly besides your point, but there's a disagreement on Chinese SI prefixes for mega and tera. Most users might use Traditional Chinese in a Taiwan context in which 百萬 is correct, but it's possible for a Macau to use TCN and expect mega to translate to 兆. This is why Chinese Wikipedia has more specific settings than just Simplified vs Traditional. It doesn't surprise me to see Google Translate struggle with this term. In any case, Bing and DeepL both agree with Google on translating it to 巨型 (giant).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kwanbix 3y ago
Honest question, why haven't china moved to a western (?) alphabet based writing? With my ignorant knowledge, it seems crazy that you are using that way of writing today. Using 24 letter combinations vs memorizing 3000 (min) to 20.000 icons! When I was a kid, my best friend was chinese, and we could never do anything on saturdays because he had to go to a school to learn chines, and how to write in chinese was very hard and time-consuming. Do you know? Care to explain? EDIT: I am not from the US, but from Argentina. EDIT2: I am talking about the effort to learn how to draw (not only read but draw!) very complex looking 3000 icons vs. the effort of learning 24/26 and some rules. With a western language, by just knowing a few pronunciation rules, you can read any word. At least in Spanish. I am not implying that Chinese are bad, or that the language should die or anything like that.
- yorwba 3y ago
  Because people like being able to read texts that already exist, so switching to a different writing system is usually a downgrade. (Also, learning to write English probably consumed more of your time than just a Saturday per week.)
- Keirmot 3y ago
  The same reason no one talks Esperanto in their day to day. Just because it's easier doesn't make it the right thing to do.
- eptcyka 3y ago
  Why is the US still using the imperial system? I'm not sure if you're aware, but asking why an ethnos/nation hasn't significantly changed their language/culture to appease someone who finds it difficult to grasp comes across as incredibly rude.
  - kwanbix 3y ago
    I am not asking for me. I never interact with Chinese writing, so it is not my problem, I am asking for them, as I imagine that learning a minimum of 3000 icons would take a lot of time. Computers struggle with Chinese writing (or at least last time I talked with my friend he had this keyboards where they had hundreds of combinations). I found that believing that a person trying to understand something and asking a respectful question is rude is incredibly rude and ignorant.
jameshush 3y ago
I'm a Western who has lived in Taipei for almost three years. I use Google Translate every day of my life. It's helped me book restaurant reservations and talk to my doctor. I also grew up in Canada, have British parents, and lived in the USA for seven years, so I'm used to switching from "Traditional English" to "Simplified English" too ;-) I mean, ya, sometimes Google Translate uses Mainland China words (e.g., I just typed Bicycle and it returned 自行車 instead of 腳踏車). But I just tried typing 土豆片 (potato chips) and translating it to "English" and it returned "potato chips" instead of the British "crisps" too. This is not a big deal at all.
- throwaway6e8f 3y ago
  I mean it’s on a par with using simplified Chinese here. People understand what you mean, but you get disapproving looks. A foreigner using G translate would probably be fine, though :)
  - sshine 3y ago
    As a 外国人, I get a lot of good will for even a weak attempt at simplified.
- uranusjr 3y ago
  自行車 is used since way before mainland China influence is significant, although 腳踏車 has always been indeed more colloquial. Rejecting 自行車 is like rejecting winter squash as American English only because you grow up calling it pumpkin. As parent said, author really seems to have shockingly little experience with non-colloquial Taiwanese Chinese to confidently publishing such a page.
- 4cao 3y ago
  Is having "lived in Taipei for almost three years," really enough to confidently claim that "this is not a big deal at all?" Especially if you "use Google Translate every day of [your] life," presumably not because you're proficient in the local language? As a matter of fact, a special "Cross-Strait" dictionary was developed to deal with all the language differences, with nearly 6,000 words and 30,000 phrases: https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10&post=19596 https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10&post=19596 It hardly seems like "no big deal" to those who should know best.
4cao 3y ago
I'd say perhaps 5 or so of the ~100 entries on the list are somewhat debatable. The rest seems pretty obvious and indisputable, and among these I would count the "通過"/"透過" that you mentioned. If anything, perhaps the whole list is too focused on the IT lexicon. But it's pretty much solid work, doesn't really deserve a "mixed opinion" - in my opinion.
carschno 3y ago
Not related to the issue raised in the article, but using a translation tool for individual words is going to give you the wrong answer in many situations by definition. The meaning of a word depends on its context. For translating a single word, a dictionary that lists all possible meanings in the target language is the right tool. A translator (human or algorithm) can only guess or give you the list of possible translations. Google Translate has come up with a suitable proxy solution by adding the "More Translations" pane.
keepamovin 3y ago
[flagged]
- raincole 3y ago
  > Do you work for Google Taiwan? I have friends who work there, but afaik they all work(ed) for Chromebook-related projects. I'm not even sure if anyone in Google Taiwan is in charge of Google Translation. > I think this pales in comparison to how you can't translate from or into Cantonese! I agree. It doesn't translate from or into Taiwanese(Taigi) either tho.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    Yeah that sucks. Isn't that related to (or the same as) Hakkawa?
    - raincole 3y ago
      Hakka is yet another language. Yeah there are so many "Chinese" languages...
      - keepamovin 3y ago
        Oh, right...Taiwanese is actually Fujianese/Fokkienese right? Or are there differences? SO MANY...ugh...despite the best efforts of the Mandarins
gargablegar 3y ago
I was in Taiwan and trying to direct a cab. I looked up the words left and right. It translated to left and correct. What followed was the driver asking me “left or right?” And me saying “correct!” And he would turn left in confusion I would start shouting “correct correct” while getting more frustrated. He was like “great I’m doing good” while I was pointing the other way. Good times I eventually had a chat with him and looked up “turn right” after driving around a block twice using left turns lol

Sniffnoy 3y ago

> Really? Do you really want to translate mega to 百萬 (million) in any context? Would its use as a metric prefix not be a correct context for this?

raincole 3y ago
My point is this site doesn't provide any context. It's very weird to say "mega should be translated to 兆/百萬/超級/巨型" without specifying the context first. A Reddit "megathread" is definitely not a 百萬討論串. *Edit: my word choice was wrong in the parent comment. I meant to say "every context", not "any context".
- ben_w 3y ago
  Literal translations often have that problem, and even human translators need context. The initial comment looked like there wasn't any context, which means "mega" could just as easily mean «SI million prefix» as «huge». In written English, the word "minute" in isolation and without context may be the noun for the time period of 60 seconds, or it may be the adjective «very small».
  - jachee 3y ago
    And even if it is representing a moment of time, it may not be representing exactly sixty seconds. It could in fact be an idiom representing an indeterminate longer interval: This particular usage has been around, colloquially, for a minute.
- Sniffnoy 3y ago
  Ah, I see.
jeffchien 3y ago
Slightly besides your point, but there's a disagreement on Chinese SI prefixes for mega and tera. Most users might use Traditional Chinese in a Taiwan context in which 百萬 is correct, but it's possible for a Macau to use TCN and expect mega to translate to 兆. This is why Chinese Wikipedia has more specific settings than just Simplified vs Traditional. It doesn't surprise me to see Google Translate struggle with this term. In any case, Bing and DeepL both agree with Google on translating it to 巨型 (giant).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kwanbix 3y ago

Honest question, why haven't china moved to a western (?) alphabet based writing? With my ignorant knowledge, it seems crazy that you are using that way of writing today. Using 24 letter combinations vs memorizing 3000 (min) to 20.000 icons! When I was a kid, my best friend was chinese, and we could never do anything on saturdays because he had to go to a school to learn chines, and how to write in chinese was very hard and time-consuming. Do you know? Care to explain? EDIT: I am not from the US, but from Argentina. EDIT2: I am talking about the effort to learn how to draw (not only read but draw!) very complex looking 3000 icons vs. the effort of learning 24/26 and some rules. With a western language, by just knowing a few pronunciation rules, you can read any word. At least in Spanish. I am not implying that Chinese are bad, or that the language should die or anything like that.

yorwba 3y ago
Because people like being able to read texts that already exist, so switching to a different writing system is usually a downgrade. (Also, learning to write English probably consumed more of your time than just a Saturday per week.)
Keirmot 3y ago
The same reason no one talks Esperanto in their day to day. Just because it's easier doesn't make it the right thing to do.
eptcyka 3y ago
Why is the US still using the imperial system? I'm not sure if you're aware, but asking why an ethnos/nation hasn't significantly changed their language/culture to appease someone who finds it difficult to grasp comes across as incredibly rude.
- kwanbix 3y ago
  I am not asking for me. I never interact with Chinese writing, so it is not my problem, I am asking for them, as I imagine that learning a minimum of 3000 icons would take a lot of time. Computers struggle with Chinese writing (or at least last time I talked with my friend he had this keyboards where they had hundreds of combinations). I found that believing that a person trying to understand something and asking a respectful question is rude is incredibly rude and ignorant.

jameshush 3y ago

I'm a Western who has lived in Taipei for almost three years. I use Google Translate every day of my life. It's helped me book restaurant reservations and talk to my doctor. I also grew up in Canada, have British parents, and lived in the USA for seven years, so I'm used to switching from "Traditional English" to "Simplified English" too ;-) I mean, ya, sometimes Google Translate uses Mainland China words (e.g., I just typed Bicycle and it returned 自行車 instead of 腳踏車). But I just tried typing 土豆片 (potato chips) and translating it to "English" and it returned "potato chips" instead of the British "crisps" too. This is not a big deal at all.

throwaway6e8f 3y ago
I mean it’s on a par with using simplified Chinese here. People understand what you mean, but you get disapproving looks. A foreigner using G translate would probably be fine, though :)
- sshine 3y ago
  As a 外国人, I get a lot of good will for even a weak attempt at simplified.
uranusjr 3y ago
自行車 is used since way before mainland China influence is significant, although 腳踏車 has always been indeed more colloquial. Rejecting 自行車 is like rejecting winter squash as American English only because you grow up calling it pumpkin. As parent said, author really seems to have shockingly little experience with non-colloquial Taiwanese Chinese to confidently publishing such a page.
4cao 3y ago
Is having "lived in Taipei for almost three years," really enough to confidently claim that "this is not a big deal at all?" Especially if you "use Google Translate every day of [your] life," presumably not because you're proficient in the local language? As a matter of fact, a special "Cross-Strait" dictionary was developed to deal with all the language differences, with nearly 6,000 words and 30,000 phrases: https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10&post=19596 https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10&post=19596 It hardly seems like "no big deal" to those who should know best.

4cao 3y ago

I'd say perhaps 5 or so of the ~100 entries on the list are somewhat debatable. The rest seems pretty obvious and indisputable, and among these I would count the "通過"/"透過" that you mentioned. If anything, perhaps the whole list is too focused on the IT lexicon. But it's pretty much solid work, doesn't really deserve a "mixed opinion" - in my opinion.

carschno 3y ago

Not related to the issue raised in the article, but using a translation tool for individual words is going to give you the wrong answer in many situations by definition. The meaning of a word depends on its context. For translating a single word, a dictionary that lists all possible meanings in the target language is the right tool. A translator (human or algorithm) can only guess or give you the list of possible translations. Google Translate has come up with a suitable proxy solution by adding the "More Translations" pane.

keepamovin 3y ago

[flagged]

raincole 3y ago
> Do you work for Google Taiwan? I have friends who work there, but afaik they all work(ed) for Chromebook-related projects. I'm not even sure if anyone in Google Taiwan is in charge of Google Translation. > I think this pales in comparison to how you can't translate from or into Cantonese! I agree. It doesn't translate from or into Taiwanese(Taigi) either tho.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Yeah that sucks. Isn't that related to (or the same as) Hakkawa?
  - raincole 3y ago
    Hakka is yet another language. Yeah there are so many "Chinese" languages...
    - keepamovin 3y ago
      Oh, right...Taiwanese is actually Fujianese/Fokkienese right? Or are there differences? SO MANY...ugh...despite the best efforts of the Mandarins

gargablegar 3y ago

I was in Taiwan and trying to direct a cab. I looked up the words left and right. It translated to left and correct. What followed was the driver asking me “left or right?” And me saying “correct!” And he would turn left in confusion I would start shouting “correct correct” while getting more frustrated. He was like “great I’m doing good” while I was pointing the other way. Good times I eventually had a chat with him and looked up “turn right” after driving around a block twice using left turns lol