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HK social media users writing phonetically spelled posts to shut out trolls

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Re: HK social media users writing phonetically spelled posts to shut out trolls

#3
post #2

Very clever. That said, there’s plenty of HKers who were happy to be govt stooges who speak Cantonese and can write English.

True, but it no doubt greatly reduces the amount of government involvement in this area.

Re: HK social media users writing phonetically spelled posts to shut out trolls

#5
post #2

Very clever. That said, there’s plenty of HKers who were happy to be govt stooges who speak Cantonese and can write English.

True, but it no doubt greatly reduces the amount of government involvement in this area.

Only for a little while. It will take a few days to make a browser extension to fix this.

Re: HK social media users writing phonetically spelled posts to shut out trolls

#6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it no doubt greatly reduces the amount of government involvement in this area.

Only for a little while. It will take a few days to make a browser extension to fix this.

What sort of browser extension are you thinking of that would only take a couple of days?

Re: HK social media users writing phonetically spelled posts to shut out trolls

#7
post #4

I tried feeding some of the phonetically spelled stuff into google translate and it was completely lost at sea. So no worries about the claim this could stuff up NLP/search, then.

How quickly could China create a dataset to translate this into Cantonese though? Probably in a year or less. It’s a game of cat and mouse and the cat will win in the end.

Re: HK social media users writing phonetically spelled posts to shut out trolls

#8
post #7
post #4

I tried feeding some of the phonetically spelled stuff into google translate and it was completely lost at sea. So no worries about the claim this could stuff up NLP/search, then.

How quickly could China create a dataset to translate this into Cantonese though? Probably in a year or less. It’s a game of cat and mouse and the cat will win in the end.

I thought the idea of a game of cat and mouse is that you never actually reach a conclusion?

Pace the obvious and awesome power of the Chinese surveillance state, nothing is foregone.

Edit: it's true that you could eventually translate the literal stuff back into Chinese characters, I'm sure, but that doesn't mean things are predetermined in a wider sense.

Re: HK social media users writing phonetically spelled posts to shut out trolls

#9
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it no doubt greatly reduces the amount of government involvement in this area.

Only for a little while. It will take a few days to make a browser extension to fix this.

There's nothing which will translate that as far as I know, it's an entirely different problem than chinese characters since Cantonese is a separate language and the phonetics are not even standardized in these messages so there's no 1 to 1 mapping to characters either.

Re: HK social media users writing phonetically spelled posts to shut out trolls

#10
post #4

I tried feeding some of the phonetically spelled stuff into google translate and it was completely lost at sea. So no worries about the claim this could stuff up NLP/search, then.

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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