Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary



me wrote:

Mok-Kong Shen wrote:

Why must one word in English always map to one word in Chinese? Why
are you judging the word-boundary of Chinese using word-boundary
information from English? Once more: what is a "word"?

I never said anything of the "necesssity" of a one-to-one
mapping of words between any two languages. But in a
translation, the ensemble of entities in one language
is certainly mapped to the ensemble of entities in another
language, if the translation is done right.


What would be a "right" translation of hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
(fear of long words) to Chinese and is there a Chinese term (such as the
English word "term") which would indicate that it is a translation of a
single English word rather than a translation of a noun clause? In other
words, can you say in Chinese, "!@#$ @#%% $#%#" is the Putonghua term for
the English word hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia"?

Since I don't properly understand the meaning of that word,
I can't translate at all. BTW, a translation can't generally
be done with big freedom. (This is true for translation between
any two languages.) If that word belongs to a scientific
field, then the opinions of the experts there would certainly
have to be respected, if the translated character or sequence
of characters is to be accepted and enter into the official
vocabulary. (I could be wrong, but to my knowledge there is
in China however no national institution (of the type in
France) tightly supervising the evolution of the language.)
Of course, for personal purposes etc., one could normally
allow oneself certain bigger freedom in translation. (As
long as the meaning is sufficiently well carried over
to the partner, then the purpose is fulfilled, isn't it?)
In general, foreign words are either translated according
to meaning or according to pronunciation or with a mixture
of these two. Thus "telephone" is translated to two
characters meaning "electricity/electrical" and "talk/speech"
respectively (sort of "talking by means of electricity").
"New York" is translated to two characters that imitate
the English pronunciation fairly well. "France" is translated
to two characters: the first sounds like "fah" (rather poor
imitation, corresponding only to the initial segment of the
pronunciation of "France"), the second is the character
denoting "state" (the state named "fah").

Characters in Chinese are printed with (certain amount of) separating spaces
just like English (orthographic) words are printed with
separating spaces.

Does a sentence have equally spaced characters or are some spaces wider than
others?

In printing, for a given font size, each character occupies
a square space of fixed (i.e. constant for that font) size
and the space between characters (normally small compared
to the size of the character) is also constant. Thus, if
one looks at a Chinese newspaper, one could see sections
where each line contains the same number of characters and
where the characters of one line lie exactly on top on
those of the next. This is an advantage of text processing
in Chinese. In English text processing, nowadays e.g. using
Latex, the processor has to adjust the spaces between the
words in order that the successive lines have the same
length, giving thus a nicer look. For a Chinese text, lines
of the same number of characters (of the same font) are
automatically of the same length and there is therefore no
need of any adjustment of the spaces between the words.
On the other hand, of course, a Chinese text processsor
must be able to print thousands of different characters,
while an English text processsor needs only be able to
print the 26 characters of the alphabet (we ignore here
punctuation marks etc. to simplify our discussion). In
the old days of mechanical typesetting this was a huge
difference (note that generally quite a number of
differently sized fonts are needed), though currently
with computers the difference (in the requirements of
software or hardware) between text processing in Chinese
and text processing in English is presumably not a
significant matter practically, apart from the input
issue, since keyboard input of Chinese obviously cannot
be done as conveniently as for English or other languages
with alphabets.

M. K. Shen

.

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