Re: THEORY: Expanding in translation?

In a message dated 3/10/2008 22:23:50 PM Central Daylight Time,
conlang@CASSOWARY.ORG writes:


> > The second was that there just isn't very much traditional Chinese text
> to
> > compare the simplified text to, so the averages are different because of a
> > paucity of data (small sample size).
> >
> > I'm going with the second reason.
>
> Isn't Traditional Chinese still preferred in Hong Kong, Singapore,
> Taiwan etc.? Of course there would be less writing due to a lower
> population, but surely it's not so small an amount that results begin to
> be wrong? There'd still be millions of users in Hong Kong alone...
>
> The thing about formality I could buy if there's a lot of premodern
> texts in the database. I don't know if anyone would've gone to that much
> trouble to actually digitise enough texts to alter the information.
>
> Is it possible that writers from Hong Kong, used to Cantonese, do not
> write things the same way as writers from Beijing, used to Mandarin?
>
Yes, traditional hanzi are still preferred in those areas.
The small sample size is only what Cucumis has in its translations, not the
whole of Chinese texts worldwide.
As for the last question, I don't know, but I would guess that it matters
only slightly, if at all.  Cantonese, when written at all, has different words
and structures, so it would presumably have a slightly different character count
than a Mandarin equivalent, but a Cantonese speaker writing in Mandarin would
probably not be much different from a native Mandarin speaker writing in
Mandarin.

stevo   </HTML>

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