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Dialect Translation


Ian_Lee

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Dialect Translation is a big industry in Mainland China:

http://chinese.chosun.com/big5/site/data/html_dir/2006/02/28/20060228000008.html

Excerpt:

中国各地的方言迥异,不同地方的人如果不使用普通话,就无法交流。但普通话的普及率仅为53%,这个缝隙市场催生出了“方言翻译”行业。据说,河北省武汉的火车站还专门配备了方言翻译。

在上海,方言翻译服务干脆直接由专业翻译公司来提供。翻译公司“上海翻译”相关人士说:“广东话翻译量最多,方言翻译费用和外语翻译相仿。

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方言 fangyan was origionally used as just a general term towards any local speech of a region, Chinese-related or not.

Western linguists influenced a kind of restructuring, they changed "fangyan" to mean dialect and "yuyan" to mean "language" but all these mutually-unintelligible languages spoken in China continued to be called fangyan - "dialects"... now dialects of a single Chinese yuyan "language".

dialect implies intelligibility.

A better term would be closer to the origional definition of 方言 - "topolect" or "regionalect"

some have suggested 通言 tong1yan2 - the tong1 matching the Greek-derived morpheme "dia" used in the English word.

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