Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT: 13th-17th June (1946-1950)
Akima:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 18 Jun 2011, 08:22 ---Google Translate says "Happy Birthday, Jeff". "Jeff" is capitalized, so Google Translate knew it was a proper name. How do you represent a non-Chinese name in Chinese? If it's phonetic, how did GT know it was a name?
--- End quote ---
I don't know about the specific mechanism used by Google Translate (GT), but as I said in a previous post Chinese characters (hanzi) cannot always be read correctly in isolation. The hanzi that make up 杰夫 (Jiéfū) do have a number of individual meanings depending on context but are a combination that GT has obviously been programmed to recognise.
GT does have a huge problem with identifying names in Chinese, but it is, if anything, more a problem with Chinese names (especially surnames) than Western ones. This is because Chinese names are are made up of fewer hanzi than the phonetic representations of Western names, so it is more difficult for GT to pick them out. For example, the Chinese surname 黑 (Hēi) also means "black" or "dark", so GT translates 黑嘉嘉 (Hēi Jiājiā) as "black Jiajia" or sometimes even "black fine" instead of recognising correctly the name of the Australian-born professional weiqi player. Only prominent Chinese people like 周恩来 (Mao Zedong) can count on having the combination of hanzi in their name recognised by GT.
In general terms, Western names are written in hanzi that sound to the Chinese ear like the syllables of the name when spoken aloud. Normally the hanzi for common given names are chosen from among the many homophones in Chinese so that their meaning is somewhat complimentary. For example many hanzi could have been chosen to sound like "Jeff", "Geoff", or "Jeph" but 杰夫 translate as "distinguished man". Less common given names, surnames, and place names are handled more pragmatically:
巴拉克奥巴马 = Bālākè Àobāmǎ (Barak Obama, remember that ke is pronounced "kuh").
乔治布什 = Qiáozhì Bùshí (George Bush, remember that Q is pronounced "Ch", zhi is roughly "juh", and shi is "shuh").
澳大利亚 ＝ Àodàlìyà (Australia)
doviende:
He's not that old, he's still a hexadecimal (i.e. base-16 numbers) teenager.
31 = 16 + 15, so that's written as "1F" in hexadecimal. So he's still "eff-teen". Next year he'll be 32, which is 16+16, so written as 20 in hexadecimal.
:-D
akronnick:
But then he doesn't get to drink Hexadecimal alcohol for another year. :psyduck:
slingstone:
That's the best kind of alcohol!
Schmorgluck:
--- Quote from: Andy147 on 19 Jun 2011, 06:54 ---
--- Quote from: doviende on 18 Jun 2011, 23:54 ---Next year he'll be 32
--- End quote ---
And a bit older.
--- End quote ---
OMG! You win a nerd cred!
It ashames me that it took me three readings to get what you did.
Well played, really.
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