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Hands on With the PSP Talkman Translator
PSP News writes "Lik Sang has a review and hands on of Sonys new Talkman accessory for the PSP, which enables translation of 4 of the worlds most spoken languages. From the article: 'Traveling and meeting people from all around the globe sure is fun, but may have its drawbacks when you're not speaking the language. To ease this barrier, innovation comes via Sony which took ScanSoft's speech recognition software and created both an universal language interpreter and trainer for English and a couple of Asian languages: Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean.'"
The top four are the following
1. Chinese* (937,132,000)
2. Spanish (332,000,000)
3. English (322,000,000)
4. Bengali (189,000,000)
In their top demographic countries.
and a couple of Asian languages: Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean
two make a couple
three make..mmm...err...more than a couple
Unless you are trying to say that Korea is a part of China or Japan!
--
Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?'
I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'
Sir George Bernard Shaw
Ok, so not very widely spoken, but despite rampant racism against ethnic Koreans in Japan, a lot of younger Japanese are really getting into Korean culture and are starting to choose Korea over the Americas and Europe as their favorite international tourist destination. (namely because of Korean soap operas, but that is beside the point). Sony would probably lose a significant chunk of sales in its home market if it neglected to include Korean.
Monstar L
Yeah, the different Chinese languages are "dialects" of each other like Spanish is a dialect of French. The only reason many Chinese like to call them "dialects" is the nationalist "One China" propaganda.
True, but you cannot extrapolate too much from your anecdote. Even by conservative estimates, the Mandarin dialect accounts for 800 million+ almost-native speakers. Your experience is colored by the fact that Cantonese is especially overrepresented in California. If you take a random Chinese person in China (or even Asia), there's a high probability that he or she understands Mandarin. It's true that the probability is much lower if you take a sample from the Chinese in the US, but there are over a billion Chinese in China and only a few million in the US. While there are indeed a lot of different and mutually incomprehensible (spoken) local variants of Chinese, in the larger scheme only two count: Mandarin and Cantonese.
Mandarin was the local dialect of the area around Beijing, and later adapted by the government as the official national language of China (both the People's Republic (PRC) and Taiwan). In absolute numbers, it is by far the most important. In the PRC, although most regions and provinces have their own dialect used in daily life, the language used on TV and school is Mandarin. This may sound like Mandarin is a second language to the local dialect for most Chinese, but it's more like a "second native" language, as 1) all courses starting from elementary school are completely in Mandarin regardless of the local dialect, and 2) the script is the same as the local dialect. Thus, the majority of Chinese from Taiwan or the PRC will speak Mandarin (in addition to their own local dialect).
Cantonese is the native dialect around Guangdong (Canton) and Hong Kong, in the south. It's less important then Mandarin, but overrepresented the West (especially California and in the UK). Its importance is due to two factors: 1) a large proportion of early Chinese emmigrants came from the Guangdong (so many later emmigrants even from other provinces learned it as it was the language of the established community) and 2) it's the native language of the economic powerhouse Hong Kong. Most younger people from HK speak Mandarin pretty decently nowadays, but not as well as those from the PRC, since (AFAIK) courses in HK schools are still taught in Cantonese, and Mandarin is indeed a second language. However, many older Chinese emmigrants in the US and their descendents only understand Cantonese.
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> Chinese is not Chinese. I worked at a company that employed several Chinese
> engineers. While they could all read the same newspaper, they couldn't all talk
> to each other. Those from the south (Hong Kong and surrounding area) couldn't
> understand those from the north.
All people in China are taught Mandarin these days, even in the south (where a student will grow up learning both Cantonese and Mandarin now).
Many Cantonese speakers will pick up Mandarin. My fiancee moved from Hong Kong around 6th grade (pre-changeover so no Mandarin in school), and learned Mandarin in AMERICA, simply from talking with other Mandarin speakers. Pretty amazing, but it only took her a year or so, and she can converse fluently in Mandarin.
Hence a Mandarin translator is about all you need, insofar as the new generation of Chinese go, especially if you are dealing with mainland China. A Cantonese one would be nice, but you'll get much better coverage with Mandarin.