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

news.rthk.hk

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

#21

Post by [deleted] »

throwawy123 wrote: post #10
s_Hogg wrote: 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-Manda…

[deleted]

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

#22

Post by ttggyyuqw »

johnzim wrote: 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.

There are also over 100 million Cantonese speakers in China.

It’s like the interesting fact there are more Mongolians in China than in Mongolia.

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

#23

Post by United857 »

throwawy123 wrote: post #15
spacehunt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jyutping is not taught in Hong Kong schools here, and it shows: people are coming up with random transliterations that are often quite hard to read.

I always assumed they taught the Yale Romanization in schools, since that's what every book I've bought in Hong Kong has used. Outside Hong Kong, Jyutping seems pretty much universal. Is everybody really typing with Cangjie/handwriting? xD

In HK, pronounciation of Cantonese words is usually just learnt orally without much formal Romanization. You wouldn't encounter Jyutping unless you're a linguist studying the language, or you study it as a non-native speaker. Similarly, a native English speaker most likely didn't learn English words by using e.g. the International Phonetic alphabet.

As an aside this has caused colloquial Cantonese prounciation to "shift" over the years [0], it's called "lazy tone". E.g. 你 (you), the proper way is 'nei5', but most younger people say it 'lei5'. It's a big debate whether this trend ought to be stopped or not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_Cantonese_pronunciation

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

#24

Post by xster »

throwawy123 wrote: post #10
s_Hogg wrote: 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-Manda…

Google Translate isn't banned in China.

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

#25

Post by koonsolo »

As a side note: If that would happen here in Flanders, not even Dutch speakers would be able to translate it. We have so many local dialects with their own pronunciation, and region bounded words, that only local people would understand what is written.

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

#26

Post by zhte415 »

throwawy123 wrote: post #10
s_Hogg wrote: 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-Manda…

Many things are banned in China, especially web services, in order to create an internal (was possibly exportable incubation, but not since 'progression' over the past 5 years after the government - hegemony of leaders and follows on, rather than government workers, themselves the mules).

But translate.google.cn is not banned on the mainland and Google services work very finely in Hong Kong.

And forcing Mandarin does people's throats is not all bad, in terms of literacy and considering that 70 years ago most of the country was illiterate, no only in language but also in ideas, such as basic western ideas in medical - which led to a huge reduction in infant mortality - the doctors and the literate going to the countryside.

And the across the sea, river, passing swamp, was Hong Kong, which figured out very much earlier and flourished.

But.. translate.google.cn is not blocked in China.

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

#27

Post by mytailorisrich »

s_Hogg wrote: 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.

Cantonese, like mandarin, is a tonal language.

The examples in the article miss the tones. It's like writing pinyin without tones (even with tones it's much less clear than using characters).

This means that understanding a sentence requires a good knowledge of the oral language and to read it all to extract the meaning from the overall context.

That seems to be the point: Software tools will be completely lost.

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

#28

Post by ferzul »

s_Hogg wrote: post #19
hardmaru wrote: post #18

Hi! Here is some information about romanisation of Cantonese if you are interested: Romanisation system for Cantonese has an interesting history! Yale romanisation system [1] is (IMO) the most readable and also later on refined as Jyutping [2], another method used in more academic contexts which IMO is less readable (both used in GBoard as Cantonese input methods). However most persons and place names in HK use older…

Somewhat off topic: any chance you know how come Google doesn't have an explicitly cantonese model for translation?

afaik Google needs a multilingual corpus. so if Cantonese is mostly written using Chinese characters, the corpus will be in Chinese characters.

and if written Cantonese is mostly informal (conversation, shop signs) it will not often be multilingual. so the approach that has worked for most languages wouldn't work then.

and it surely wouldn't work for a completely different, lossy orthography - without independent training.

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

#29

Post by floatingatoll »

zhte415 wrote: post #26
throwawy123 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-Manda…

Many things are banned in China, especially web services, in order to create an internal (was possibly exportable incubation, but not since 'progression' over the past 5 years after the government - hegemony of leaders and follows on, rather than government workers, themselves the mules). But translate.google.cn is not banned on the mainland and Google services work very finely in Hong Kong. And forcing Mandarin does…

It’s not about forcing Mandarin being bad, it’s about prohibiting non-Mandarin being bad.

US equivalent to this would be forcing English (which we do) while jailing anyone who teaches Creole (which we don’t).

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