I should start by saying I took 3 years of Chinese in grad school as foundation for advanced studies in Chinese history and I'm a living history reenactor studying 13th century Jin dynasty/early mongol period. I'm also a life long aviculturist.
I'm trying to document for an officer in my living history group something about Chinese explorations to Indonesia and the parrot species kept in Chinese aviculture. So I needed the precise terms for the different parrot species and parrot branches that would have been used by the Chinese. I typed parrot and got the correct term I knew from school: yingwu. Then I typed "cockatoo"--which should have given me something in the direction of "white parrot" or crested parrot or the like. Instead I got the SAME TERM--YINGWU. I know for CERTAIN THE CHINESE HAVE WORDS FOR COCKATOO. In fact, having spoken to many from China, I know they have very technical words for each species. They have technical terms for every technical term I have in aviculture. There is an exact phrase for Citron lesser sulfer crested cockatoo and for Abbott's cockatoo. If anything, since the Chinese encountered these species a millenimum before Europeans did, their names predate European names (our term cockatoo comes from the south pacific name for the bird, after all!) it's incorrect to not have the right terms for these birds in good translate. I've seen lots of other errors with the Chinese. Someone from China really needs to go over the database. I would correct it except I don't have a character generator. -- 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.
