What Is A 坪?
In Taiwan, instead of using square feet or meters to measure area, they use 坪. This character is alternatively pronounced 평/pyeong in Korea, tsubo in Japan and ping in Taiwan. I mention this because it came up in a translation that I was doing today. No dictionary I had mentioned what a 坪 was; I ended up calling a Taiwanese friend who set me straight.
I mention this to bring up slight differences between mainland and Taiwanese Chinese.
One translation company I talked to asked me which variety of Chinese I specialised in; Traditional or Simplified. (In case you didn't know, Simplified is used on the mainland, Traditional in Taiwan and Hong Kong.) My immediate reaction was that I didn't care. - Although I prefer Simplified characters all you have to do if someone gives you a tricky passage in Traditional is input it into an automatic converter (like this one) and it's transferred automatically.
As it turns out it's not as simple as that. The difference in writing between Taiwan and the mainland is trivial, and easily adjusted for by automatic converters. But they have a certain turn of phrase in Taiwan (and Hong Kong, for that matter) and some local oddities (like the 坪 issue I mention above) that do make for some differences.
March 14th, 2010 - 17:09
“(In case you didn’t know, Traditional is used on the mainland, Simplified in Taiwan and Hong Kong.)”
sorry, but i guess its the other way around…
March 14th, 2010 - 17:23
waaah my English is getting worse and worse! Thanks nameless reader!
March 17th, 2010 - 16:18
Interesting article. I believe the unit 坪 was initially from Japan and then ported to Republic of China and Korea. Please read the article on wikipedia:
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9D%AA
The grammar between traditional and simplified Chinese is almost the same but usage of some words is different, especially for words translated from foreign languages. One example is laser, which is called 镭射 in Taiwan and 激光 in mainland. However, I would say the difference between Taiwan Chinese and mainland Chinese is still much smaller than that between mandarin and written Cantonese. As a mandarin speaker I have no problem reading blogs/news from Taiwan but often found myself confused when reading what my Guangdong/Hong Kong friend wrote.
May 19th, 2010 - 23:49
waaah my English is getting worse and worse! Thanks nameless reader!