Trying to learn a few Mandarin (Putong hua) lessons beyond Pinyin, I noticed how bizarrely different Cantonese based newspapers are. But most ethnic Chinese refuse to admit any inferiority in reading characters; some even reading Japanese Chinese characters stubbornly or intelligently. Similarly we stubbornly or intelligently do the same with our English word roots in French, Latin and Greek and newer textual influences such as Jamaican, Mexican, jargon heavy, popular or urban US.
Developing parallel text could be done with further parallel root text or distinct influence parallel text but that's at a more advanced stage of text analysis requiring comparisons around source, date and location. But the future of any translator moving into machine capable response would require some understanding of the networks that developed comprised languages. Google's brute force approach might find capability anyway! On Apr 1, 1:27 pm, Harald Korneliussen wrote: > I for one wouldn't mind seeing Cantonese recognized as a distinct > written language, in Google Translate and elsewhere. However, > chinyuwan, you must know that Google requires a large corpus of > parallel text in order to add a new translator (also an even larger > body of single-language text, but they can usually find that on their > own!). > > Also, the Chinese government seem to want to decide how much regional > distinctiveness people are allowed to express, so I doubt they would > like this. But it seems Google has decided to not care much about what > they think any longer, so who knows? :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-translate-general?hl=en.
