Monday, March 28, 2011

Google Translate (Chinese --> English) read in Chinese dialect instead of translating to English

I am a fan of Google Translate. I use the tool quite often, and it helps me well on learning foreign languages such as Chinese (weird eh, but Chinese languages are foreign languages to me) and Spanish.

I came across this:
 Er, this loosely a 'Chinese' reading of the Chinese characters, but it's in Cantonese I guess, not Mandarin.
I expected that the translation was something like "Happy Chinese New Year", or "Happy New Year", instead it shows up in one of those dialects.

Meanwhile the same thing when you put the characters in English --> Chinese translation, they will put the same characters, along with the Mandarin pronounciation below (gong1xi2 fa1cai3).

It's a weird translation, but I guess a lot of source texts are just simply takes in "Kung Hei Fat Choi" as 'unofficial' English translation? 

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