Help with Taishanese

Tomasz Poplawski wrote:

My long-time client is looking for an English > Taishanese translator. I first thought it was a typo, plus the typical blissful US ignorance, and she meant the Chinese language as spoken in Taiwan - but no, she wants Taishanese.
Could you please let me know if you, or someone you know, translates into that language? How close is it to Cantonese?
The text is not too large (a 1,000 words or so), and the subject is labor relations.
Thanks in advance - and if you ever need to figure out a Polish dialect - I can help

[Edited at 2013-04-12 19:41 GMT]

James_xia wrote:




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4kwadCilXI

Here is a video, in which we can see that Taishanese is spoken quite differently from Cantonese. I can speak some Cantonese, but simply not knowing what the hostess said without the subtitle.

Hi Nigerose, you should know more about the differences between them.

Anyone here who may help? Please also come along to give him a hand. Thanks in advance!

Phil Hand wrote:

You mean she has a written document that she wants translating into "Taishanese"?

I think that's impossible. Most Chinese languages don't have a written version, so it's quite unlikely that "written Taishanese" even exists.

Furthermore, there are literally no literate speakers of Chinese languages in mainland China who cannot read Mandarin. If they've learned to read at all, they will be capable of reading standard Mandarin Chinese. So there would be very little benefit gained from producing a document written in Taishanese.

I suggest you recommend to your client that straightforward translation into Chinese is find for documents. If she needs a Taishanese interpreter for a visit, then she can find one there.

Update:
Nigerose's link confirms this:

pkchan wrote:

I agree that the TEXT should be translated into written Chinese. For people with very low reading proficiency, even if the text is written in Chinese using some familiar Taishanese terms, the problem may still exist. Here are a few Taishanese examples﹕

English Taishanese Chinese

America/US 花旗 美國
tips 花利 小費
vacation 稍涼 渡假/放假
basement 土庫 地牢
no space 無處（音隨） 無地方/空間
where 嚀 那裡
here 該 這裡
umbrella 油紙/傘 雨傘
clothes 衫 衣服
tomorrow 天早 明天
go for a trip 撓 旅遊/遊玩

Tomasz Poplawski wrote:

Maybe I should have been more precise about the audience: this is for members of a labor union located in the US.
When I read the Wiki entry about Taishanese, the following caught my eye:

"In the mid to late 19th century, a significant number of Chinese emigrating to North America originated from this area, making Taishanese a dominant variety of the Chinese language spoken in North American Chinatowns. It was formerly the lingua franca of the overseas Chinese residing in the United States."

Would that change your recommendations?

However, in the coastal county-level city called Toi San, my ancestors had a slightly different mother tongue. Some people refer to Taishanese as a dialect of Cantonese, but I almost feel that it is a different language altogether. It’s a little more crude and has an air of “village speak” for some people. In general, Toi San people can understand Guangdong Cantonese but usually not the other way around. Whatever the case, Toi San was the Chinese that I knew. In fact, that’s probably the Chinese that most people knew in North America up until the late 1980s.

According to Wikipedia, “as late as 1988, those with ancestry from Taishan accounted for 70% of Chinese Americans.” Aside from the people who were brought here to build the railroads, the Taishanese represented the first major wave of Chinese immigrants into North America. Mostly poor and outcast by Western European Canadians, these Taishanese immigrants formed Vancouver’s Chinatown in Canada’s poorest postal code. These days, it’s rare to hear anyone speak Toi San in public. Since my grandparents passed away, I haven’t spoken much of it either.

wherestip wrote:

We're basically talking about ethnic Chinese living in North America who don't understand English. In my opinion, by and large these are not the descendants of 19th-century immigrants, who instead have long assimilated into American society. Even if there are some stragglers living in Chinatown who never step foot outside the circle where they live, they are so advanced in age that labor relations are no longer an issue that concerns them.

IMO, your readership is mainly new adult immigrants who don't understand much English. These folks mainly speak Cantonese and Mandarin. And they can all read either HK Cantonese or standard Chinese.