Advice to conforming Westerners translating from Chinese

[Woods]

I spent six hours yesterday recollecting the tone marks on all Chinese words written in a long article about China in a French magazine. Why not keep the pīnyīn accents when you translate - out of assumption that Westerners are mentally incapable of reading text with accents or that each and every one of them will never and should never learn Chinese?

[Karavinka]

Assuming the rest of the French magazine article was in French, it was written for French-speaking audiences, and not Chinese-speaking audiences.

But if you also happen to know Chinese, whether you see the tone marks in pinyin or not does not make any difference when you read and/or pronounce Chinese words.

Unless the article is explicitly guided for the language learners, why should anyone bother?

[Woods]

"Why bother" seems to be your life philosophy. It should have been apparent from the way I've phrased it that this is not a question but my personal recommendation (and I don't see a point in you coming and shitting in every topic of mine). Here are a few reasons to bother:

- It will provide clues to pronunciation to everyone who is not proficient in Chinese, but knows what the four tone marks are four (which is something that anyone could learn in two minutes)

- Therefore it would help get more insight into Chinese anyone who reads the article, and I would believe this would be interesting to the majority of people reading the article, which contains names of people, places etc. (And even if you don't know Chinese, when you read some person's name, you might as well want to be able to pronounce it.)

There are absolutely no downsides to including the accents that I can think of - besides taking a few extra seconds to enter the appropriate mark or copy-paste it. It would be well worth it, considering that it will benefit anyone who reads the article. And I can assure you, it looks better with the accents.

With that explanation, even someone as non-bothering as you should be able to understand my point. If you don't, I really don't give a fuck about what you are going to answer, so don't bother.



To linguoboy: this m*th*rf*ck*r called me "a troll writing bullshit" besides being highly annoying and came into every single one of my five last posts writing nothing but pointless objections to everything I said and not adding anything of his own (besides a few useful things about Korean, which he seems to know). Call it whatever you want, but I don't like that stuff, and I don't see why you'd side with that, or intend to answer to any personal comments about me whatsoever from now on. On top of that I don't really have much time to write such posts - I was planning to answer to one of your replies in the Chinese forum next but my time was eaten by that bullshit and I was like f**k UL...

[Karavinka]

All right, I see all the marvelous benefits. I suggest you talk to Global Times and People's Daily first and suggest them to add tone marks to every Pinyin. I hope they take your "advice", persuading them will have much more impact than complaining on Unilang.

PS. As you can probably read from my tone, I'm more amused than offended.

[Woods]

True, but since I've been hanging out in this forum I thought I might advise UniLangers as well.

I'm more amused than offended.

Yeah, I consider a lot of the stuff you're writing utter nonsense but you don't sound like a bad person. For example that stuff about the Martian language I read a bit of the article and laughed as well - thinking you had made a funny joke but then realised you might have been serious

(which would show complete lack of understanding of what I actually wrote and from then - no point in me answering you, if somebody gets the point then I'll answer)

I suggest you talk to Global Times and People's Daily

Absolutely ridiculous - I suggest you read the title of my post and hopefully you find why.

[Karavinka]

For example that stuff about the Martian language I read a bit of the article and laughed as well - thinking you had made a funny joke but then realised you might have been serious

This was not a joke. What you were suggesting is little different from Martian. You think it's for aesthetic purposes; you can get away with using archaic variants if you're doing Seal Script calligraphy. Otherwise you'll look like a kid defying the standard orthography for fun.

Absolutely ridiculous - I suggest you read the title of my post and hopefully you find why.

If you're keen on making unsolicited "advices" to random people on the Internet, it'd be better to be prepared to get completely ignored as well. After all, if China is writing Chinese words without tone marks, why should the foreigners bother?

[Woods]

For example that stuff about the Martian language I read a bit of the article and laughed as well - thinking you had made a funny joke but then realised you might have been serious

This was not a joke.

The joke is that I'm talking about unused characters and you send me a link to an article about Taiwanese Internet language consisting of Latin letters and symbols. Actually the bigger joke is that while you're doing that you're super confident that you've sent me some super-smartass brilliant argument that my ideas are stupid. Like you ask me what I think of old cars and I send you an article about how some people suck at gardening! And being the well-meaning person that I am, I even thought for a moment that you had made a funny joke!

if China is writing Chinese words without tone marks, why should the foreigners bother?

Name five things that Chinese state-run media is doing right?

If you're keen on making unsolicited "advices" to random people on the Internet, it'd be better to be prepared to get completely ignored as well.

Better to be ignored than to be bombarded with bullshit.

You can't put advice in the plural, for the record - and to get back to what this forum was meant for.

[Karavinka]

Name five things that Chinese state-run media is doing right?

So, even China can't write Chinese words properly. Not surprising, since you seem to think all native speakers of whatever language you nitpick are idiots and you have brilliant ideas to enlighten those muggles.

It's amusing how you selectively understand and ignore the rest, while you react angrily when others do the same to you (or so you think).

Yes, your ideas for "improving" whatever language you're talking about is stupid, and if you want to be proven wrong and you're actually right about all those things, go talk to the language authorities and convince them instead of whining on the Internet. When you write bullshit on the Internet, you'll get hit back with bullshit.

[Woods]

So, even China can't write Chinese words properly. Not surprising, since you seem to think all native speakers of whatever language you nitpick are idiots and you have brilliant ideas to enlighten those muggles.

I for sure think you are an idiot and unenlightened about a lot of topics.

I suggest we cut it there cause our conversation is completely pointless.

[linguoboy]

I spent six hours yesterday recollecting the tone marks on all Chinese words written in a long article about China in a French magazine. Why not keep the pīnyīn accents when you translate - out of assumption that Westerners are mentally incapable of reading text with accents or that each and every one of them will never and should never learn Chinese?

So there seems to be a general opinion among editors in the West that diacritics are "distracting" and should be dispensed with wherever possible. If you look at English-language media, you'll see they routinely omit diacritics even from Western languages like Spanish and German which many, many more readers are likely to be learning than are learning Chinese. (It's interesting in this respect to see how the Economist has shifted its practices over the years. For a long time, they only insisted on diacritics for Spanish, French, and German. More recently, they've begun including them for Eastern European languages like Hungarian. Maybe at some point they'll eventually get to including them for Pinyin.)

It annoys me, too. I find it equally bad if not worse with Korean, where an informal spelling like "chung" can represent at least six different Korean syllables. I once asked a coworker with little foreign language knowledge if she would really find a text harder to read if the foreign names and words in it had the correct diacritics and she said yes, so I've reluctantly accepted that there may be some basis for this practice.

[Osias]

I understand why they write "São Paulo" as "Sao Paulo" but not why they write "Sao Paolo".

[linguoboy]

I understand why they write "São Paulo" as "Sao Paulo" but not why they write "Sao Paolo".

I was going to ask "Who writes 'Sao Paolo'?" but according to a preliminary Google search, apparently the Independent?

The Brits make a lot of perverse choices. When I was living in Freiburg, I discovered that they used an exonym for the Swiss city of Basel: Basle, pronounced [beɪ̯l]. This is an obsolete French spelling, dating from before the circumflex was used to indicate lengthening due to loss of a vowel. (The current French name is Bâle.) But it's not a French-speaking city and never has been. Moreover, we USAmericans weren't previously familiar with it so we were happy to call it by its German name (with the German pronunciation since we all spoke German anyway).

[Osias]

I understand why they write "São Paulo" as "Sao Paulo" but not why they write "Sao Paolo".

I was going to ask "Who writes 'Sao Paolo'?" but according to a preliminary Google search, apparently the Independent?

I don't remember who exactly, but a lot of media vehicles I've read along the years.

[Woods]

If you look at English-language media, you'll see they routinely omit diacritics even from Western languages like Spanish and German which many, many more readers are likely to be learning than are learning Chinese.

I know that some do with French too, but I'm not one of them - it looks much more cool to me with them. And actually the less I know the language, the more important I think they are - because in the case of Chinese, I just have no damn idea how to read the thing if there is no tone mark.

Korean is interesting, actually - from what I've heard (a few samples recorded in Wikipedia articles), the sounds are quite different to what I would imagine when seeing the romanisation, but at least I hope it's consistent? (cause Chinese has some other styles beside pinyin, used notably in Taiwan).

Yet what should be spelt hangeul I suppose is widely known as hangul - so I guess not?

When I was living in Freiburg, I discovered that they used an exonym for the Swiss city of Basel: Basle, pronounced [beɪ̯l]. This is an obsolete French spelling, dating from before the circumflex was used to indicate lengthening due to loss of a vowel. (The current French name is Bâle.) But it's not a French-speaking city and never has been.

Switzerland is a French-speaking country though, and England was at some point. It's different with those historical names, maybe Bâle was relevant to French people before it became a German-speaking town and that's why it became known as that. So is Beijing Pékin and Nanjing Nankin. I don't have a problem with that - but those are a few towns that everyone knows by their alternative names. What I find super weird though is when they take the name of some place or person that nobody has heard of and try to make it more French, more Polish or whatever. Much better to stick to pinyin, and hopefully the Economist adds the accents!

I understand why they write "São Paulo" as "Sao Paulo" but not why they write "Sao Paolo".

I was going to ask "Who writes 'Sao Paolo'?" but according to a preliminary Google search, apparently the Independent?

I don't remember who exactly, but a lot of media vehicles I've read along the years.

Maybe it's lack of knowledge coupled with total lack of care to check how the name is to be written. It's definitely not every day I hear someone talk of São Paulo or have the occasion to write it, so my instinct would be to google it and check how it is spelt before I do.



Btw linguoboy, what is your relationship with Asian languages? You said you've spent a lot of time working with Chinese and you've learnt Korean, and yet you've given yourself one-star rating for both languages - is this your usual humbleness or is it just some general interest and nothing more?

[Karavinka]

Korean is interesting, actually - from what I've heard (a few samples recorded in Wikipedia articles), the sounds are quite different to what I would imagine when seeing the romanisation, but at least I hope it's consistent? (cause Chinese has some other styles beside pinyin, used notably in Taiwan).

Yet what should be spelt hangeul I suppose is widely known as hangul - so I guess not?

I'm not going to go into details since this is Chinese forum, but a quick note there's no consistency in Romanization in Korea. It's not rare for Koreans themselves to be unable to predict Hangul from Romanized names. Nobody in South Korea knew if the next North Korean leader's name was 김정은 or 김정운 until North Korea officially revealed him, because the name leak came in Romanization "Kim Jong-un" only.

[linguoboy]

Korean is interesting, actually - from what I've heard (a few samples recorded in Wikipedia articles), the sounds are quite different to what I would imagine when seeing the romanisation, but at least I hope it's consistent? (cause Chinese has some other styles beside pinyin, used notably in Taiwan).

There are several standardised systems, the most important of which are Revised Romanisation (official in South Korea), McCune-Reischauer (formerly the dominant system for English-speakers and still used by the Library of Congress among others), and Yale (the preferred system in linguistically-oriented publications).

Yet what should be spelt hangeul I suppose is widely known as hangul - so I guess not?

Hangeul is the RR form. The proper Mc-R is han'gŭl but--as I said-- it's common for English-language editors to omit diacritics, so this commonly becomes hangul. RR has the advantage that the digraph is eu can't be abridged in this way, but the disadvantage that people are often confused about how to pronounce it. Of course, the same is true of ŭ, since the breve simply isn't a common diacritic in Western languages and doesn't normally indicate spread lips when it is used.

Switzerland is a French-speaking country though

Not really; less than 23% of the population is French-speaking. (For comparison, almost 32% of the population of Indonesia speaks Javanese and no one calls it "a Javanese-speaking country".)

England was at some point.

Nope, never. The Norman population of England in the aftermath of the invasion is estimated at about 8000 compared to a native English-speaking population of 2 to 2.5 million. That's one third of one percent. You might as well call the USA "Klingon-speaking".

It's different with those historical names, maybe Bâle was relevant to French people before it became a German-speaking town and that's why it became known as that.

Nope; it became Germanic in language before "French" even existed as a language.

Btw linguoboy, what is your relationship with Asian languages? You said you've spent a lot of time working with Chinese and you've learnt Korean, and yet you've given yourself one-star rating for both languages - is this your usual humbleness or is it just some general interest and nothing more?

It's difficult to shoehorn my language expertise into the star system used here because it's geared toward speaking and my skill set is heavily lopsided towards reading and writing. I studied Korean in college but never became truly conversational. I was conversational in Standard Chinese at one point but I haven't kept that up either. So I'm in the odd position of knowing hundreds of characters on sight but struggling to put together sentences in both languages. I know a lot about both languages, but I put the low ratings there because I didn't want randos addressing me in Korean or Chinese and expecting a timely reply.

[Dormouse559]

So there seems to be a general opinion among editors in the West that diacritics are "distracting" and should be dispensed with wherever possible. If you look at English-language media, you'll see they routinely omit diacritics even from Western languages like Spanish and German which many, many more readers are likely to be learning than are learning Chinese. (It's interesting in this respect to see how the Economist has shifted its practices over the years. For a long time, they only insisted on diacritics for Spanish, French, and German. More recently, they've begun including them for Eastern European languages like Hungarian. Maybe at some point they'll eventually get to including them for Pinyin.)

It annoys me, too. I find it equally bad if not worse with Korean, where an informal spelling like "chung" can represent at least six different Korean syllables. I once asked a coworker with little foreign language knowledge if she would really find a text harder to read if the foreign names and words in it had the correct diacritics and she said yes, so I've reluctantly accepted that there may be some basis for this practice.

Relatedly, The Associated Press has advised users to omit all diacritics for a long time because apparently some companies that use its newswire have computers that don’t support them. However, it recently adjusted that guidance to allow diacritics in people’s names and in non-English quotations.

Speaking purely from my own perspective, I find diacritics helpful to the extent that I know or can guess what they mean. Since I have plenty of European-language experience, I like seeing them on most European languages. By contrast, I haven’t studied tones much and don’t have an intuitive grasp of what tone a given pinyin diacritic corresponds to. I also tend to encounter romanized Chinese in contexts where it’s limited to isolated words or phrases that are accompanied by an English translation, so the absence of diacritics doesn’t impact me all that much. But, to take another example, I so closely associate Vietnamese with its diacritics that I would notice if a word were missing them, so maybe it also has to do with a language’s main writing system.

[Linguaphile]

Relatedly, The Associated Press has advised users to omit all diacritics for a long time because apparently some companies that use its newswire have computers that don’t support them. However, it recently adjusted that guidance to allow diacritics in people’s names and in non-English quotations.

This used to be enormously more common. I think a lot of these practices come from back when this situation was very widespread. When I started doing language stuff online it was the 1990s, Unicode existed but was much less extensive and not used everywhere. Even if you could properly type diacritics, if it was being published online or sent in an email rather than in a print publication, chances were very high that the users reading them on the other end would see them as � or▯or alphanumeric codes enclosed by semicolons or some seemingly-random other letters with diacritics. (I remember that I had many diacritics on a website, and at one point some sort of update changed it so that I couldn't even read my own diacritics that I had typed myself, even on my own website. That's how widespread the problem was!) So the result was that people would type without diacritics because that was the only way to be confident that the person on the other end (or your future self after a software update) would be able to see it (reasonably) properly. Sao Paulo isn't ideal, but it's easier to read, understand and pronounce - and more correct - than S�o Paulo or São Paulo.
And this practice just "stuck". Even though it's much easier to type and read a word like São Paulo correctly now and nearly impossible for a software update to scramble it, it sounds like that ability to type and read it properly is still not universal, and by now people have gotten used to seeing it as Sao Paulo too.

[Woods]

I'm not going to go into details since this is Chinese forum

It's an every-language forum, so go ahead - as long as it doesn't have a personal comment about me (it's not a forum about me on the other hand) it's all good!

There are several standardised systems, the most important of which are Revised Romanisation (official in South Korea), McCune-Reischauer (formerly the dominant system for English-speakers and still used by the Library of Congress among others), and Yale (the preferred system in linguistically-oriented publications).

Why is it preferred and why does the Wikipedia article about the Korean alphabet use Revised Romanisation then?

I picked two books from the library a couple of months ago and one had the romanisation with the diacritics, I remember I was then thinking that I didn’t like it and that it was North-Korean romanisation or something. Then the other book had no romanisation at all and after looking at it stupidly for two minutes, I realised this is the right approach - after all if you're going to read 600 pages of grammar about a language, how dumb do you have to be not to learn to read its simple script of 30 characters or something?

I think I would even prefer seeing Korean characters in English-language text, something like the characters first and then revised romanisation in parentheses.

Example: 가라윅가 (Karavinka) is a smart man. 😁

(I tried to write it without the circle but the keyboard ain't letting me!) 🙄

Switzerland is a French-speaking country though

Not really; less than 23% of the population is French-speaking.

Well, I mean it's as much a French-speaking country on a federal level as it is a German-speaking one, you get what I mean. From there the Basle - like you explained.

England was at some point.

Nope, never. The Norman population of England in the aftermath of the invasion is estimated at about 8000 compared to a native English-speaking population of 2 to 2.5 million.

The language was prevalent among the elites at some point, wasn't it? So much so that 30% of modern-English vocabulary is pure French.

I remember that I had many diacritics on a website, and at one point some sort of update changed it so that I couldn't even read my own diacritics that I had typed myself, even on my own website. That's how widespread the problem was!

Yeah, that's actually a real problem and it still exists some places. I don't know enough about how UniCode is implemented in operating systems, I know I can type in whatever language I want in a text file and when I reopen it it's readable, but I know I can't save file names in Chinese and (I think) Cyrillic characters - or at least not on a Fat drive (I have one), maybe on ext3 it works but I'm not sure. Long story short there might be people omitting the characters to avoid file-system and text-editor compatibility issues for a good reason, and that's a shame - I hope it gets completely sorted out soon. (If somebody has good ideas how to improve that let us hear them).

[Karavinka]

There are, in fact, 5 different Romanization schemes.

1. Yale: You're unlikely to see this in wild, only linguists use this.
2. McCune-Reischauer: Official from 1984 to 2000 in South Korea.
3. North Korean: This is a modified form of McR.
4. Revised Romanization: Official since 2000 in South Korea.

What do they look like? Let's say, Pyongyang:

P'yŏngyang in McCune-Reischauer.
Pyongyang in North Korean.
Pyeongyang in Revised Romanization.

In Wikipedia, all South Korean place names will be spelled in RR, whereas all North Korean place names will be in North Korean. Korean topic articles specific to either Korea will also follow their respective spellings, which can cause amusing pairs like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegukka
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegukga

The Hangul is 애국가 for both. When the article is not specifically about either Korea but for both, it usually uses Revised Romanization following the southern standard, except ones like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimchi

since Wikipedia prioritizes the most common English usage.



Anyways, the most important type is the adhoc spelling, how people simply decide to respell their name following English phonetic spelling. For example, a very common surname 정 may appear as Chŏng (McR), Jeong (RR) or Chong, which is McR minus diacritic and Chung, spelled to rhyme with English "sung."

This is very likely to persist in the future, as people will not go through the trouble to change whatever Romanization they already have on the passport. And this will continue with their children too, it could cause trouble if they have a surname that's different from the rest of their family. As soon as they're outside Korea, they'll have a hard time proving their family relationships.

Let's take three last presidents...

Park Geun-hye. Park is an adhoc spelling, based on the phonetic similarity between 박 and English "park". Geun-hye is Revised Romanization.

Moon Jae-in. Moon is an adhoc spelling, again based on similarity with English "moon." Jae-in is Revised Romanization.

Yoon Suk Yeol. Yoon is an adhoc spelling, again to rhyme with "noon" or "moon." Suk is an adhoc, but Yeol conforms with RR.

Park and Moon hyphenate their disyllabic names, Yoon spaces instead. That's again, totally up to each individual. I personally spell my given name as one word, no space or hyphen, which is another valid way.

Same with the companies and organizations who keep their old spellings. There's no way Samsung will change their name to "Samseong" just to conform to some spelling reform and risk shaking their brand power; Hyundai won't change to "Hyeondae", nor Kia will rebrand itself to "Gia."

As a result, if I see an unfamiliar Korean name only in Romanization, I'll probably have a good guess of what the underlying Hangul might be, but at times it's impossible to be sure.



Now Woods, if you think this is a nightmare of a situation, you're probably right, but we ain't changing people's names. They choose to spell their names in whatever way they think makes sense, within reason. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone agreed to come up with a standard and consistent way to do things like this? Suuuuure, but who's going to pay for all that? Signs will need to be made again, brands will need to change, everyone will need to renew their passport and the confusion following it will make reforms simply NOT PRACTICAL and it's NOT WORTH.

By the way, if you've noticed me objecting every "suggestion" you make about changing how a language should be spelled, take this as a reason. Who's going to pay for that cost and is the benefit great enough to justify the cost? "It would be nice only if..." oh yeah, just like it'd be nice if people could all be sharing and caring and the World's problems will be over.