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Comment by throwawy123 | Hacker News Reader

No, you can actually type this straight into Google Translate and it will work fine. After selecting Chinese as the language, you have to set the input method as "Cantonese." Of course, Google Translate is banned in China. ;)

This isn't a secret code or anything; it's a standard romanization that almost everyone who learns Cantonese formally will learn. The thing is---formal education in Cantonese and other non-Mandarin Chinese languages is banned in schools in China. Mainlanders that speak Cantonese as a primary language often don't even know how to use it (I talked to a Cantonese-speaking girl from Zhuhai, and she was like "Can you show me what Jyutping looks like?" Bizarre).

It's pretty smart, and a bit of a slap in the face to the establishment, which has been forcing Mandarin down people's throats for the past 50 years or so.

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Many things are banned in China, especially web services, in order to create an internal (was possibly exportable incubation, but not since 'progression' over the past 5 years after the government - hegemony of leaders and follows on, rather than government workers, themselves the mules).

But translate.google.cn is not banned on the mainland and Google services work very finely in Hong Kong.

And forcing Mandarin does people's throats is not all bad, in terms of literacy and considering that 70 years ago most of the country was illiterate, no only in language but also in ideas, such as basic western ideas in medical - which led to a huge reduction in infant mortality - the doctors and the literate going to the countryside.

And the across the sea, river, passing swamp, was Hong Kong, which figured out very much earlier and flourished.

But.. translate.google.cn is not blocked in China.

It’s not about forcing Mandarin being bad, it’s about prohibiting non-Mandarin being bad.

US equivalent to this would be forcing English (which we do) while jailing anyone who teaches Creole (which we don’t).

No one is going to get jailed for teaching Cantonese in China. There are plenty of commercial offerings, e.g. this free introductory course I found: https://www.wanmen.org/courses/586d23485f07127674135d64

Mandarin being the primary language of education doesn't mean that Cantonese is prohibited; it's just not mandatory, so most native Cantonese speakers aren't going to get a formal education in it unless they specifically seek it out.

Thank you for the correction; it’s too late to edit but I would if I could :(

For the US equivalent, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_sch...

Jyutping is not taught in Hong Kong schools here, and it shows: people are coming up with random transliterations that are often quite hard to read.

I always assumed they taught the Yale Romanization in schools, since that's what every book I've bought in Hong Kong has used.

Outside Hong Kong, Jyutping seems pretty much universal.

Is everybody really typing with Cangjie/handwriting? xD

Many people type with Cangjie because that's what gets taught. Very few people know Jyutping, and even fewer type with it; most people encountering Jyutping for the first time wouldn't know how to pronounce it, largely because of the unfamiliar 'j' and 'eo'.

For day to day transliterations of names etc there's actually no standard, just some loose rules based on English pronunciation.

In HK, pronounciation of Cantonese words is usually just learnt orally without much formal Romanization. You wouldn't encounter Jyutping unless you're a linguist studying the language, or you study it as a non-native speaker. Similarly, a native English speaker most likely didn't learn English words by using e.g. the International Phonetic alphabet.

As an aside this has caused colloquial Cantonese prounciation to "shift" over the years [0], it's called "lazy tone". E.g. 你 (you), the proper way is 'nei5', but most younger people say it 'lei5'. It's a big debate whether this trend ought to be stopped or not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_Cantonese_pronunciation

Most people use either Cangjie or the number pad on their phones. Office communications are generally conducted in English but where Chinese is needed, Cangjie is the preferred method. Our keyboards all have both QWERTY and 手田水口廿卜 printed on them.

Yeah, I just tried it and didn't know which characters to pick after the initial "heung gong" in "heung gong ya gan yau". So even if it doesn't actually break automatic translation, it does break the user like you say :)

You also might try Bing Translate, which actually has Cantonese translation. Google Translate can take Cantonese input, but since it's really just a Mandarin translation engine, it won't correctly interpret Cantonese words and grammar.

Hmm, at your suggestion I've just tried Bing and it doesn't seem to know what to do with the Romanisation? Interesting to know that Bing explicitly has Cantonese translation catered for but Google doesn't. Wonder why that is?

The step that's missing for me is how to turn the Romanisation into Chinese characters.

Google Translate isn't banned in China.

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