Hi Josh,
Cantonese is a spoken dialect of standard Chinese (i.e. Mandarin) in the same way that Italian, French and Spanish are spoken dialects of Latin. If Chinese was written using phonetic characters instead of ideographs, then Cantonese would surely be classified as distinct from Mandarin as Italian is from Latin. Many Cantonese-speakers read and write in Mandarin-style Chinese because this is the standard in the chinese education system. Whilst it may be correct to write in such a style in formal writing, speaking in "Mandarin-style Cantonese" other than in specialist circles is considered far too artificial and unnatural. By making the statement "While we're quite proud that we already support 52 of the worlds languages, there are still many more languages that we would love to enable for our users... So if we don't support your language yet, rest assured, we're working on it..." (Google Groups->Google Translate->General->When will Google Translate support language X?) Google has put out the expectation among users that as and when technically achievable Google will be launching a Cantonese translator. Such a technical achievability exists today. I have attached the open-source copyright-free download.zip from http://www.cantoneselang.comwhich includes a translator for chiinese<->cantonese and simplified<->traditional. The site http://www.cantoneselang.com provides a working demonstration. Regards, Newbie2 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-translate-general/-/ImTNfW7gUL4J. 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.
