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Karen's observation regarding Japanese is also true for Chinese. In my
11 years of dealing with non-native speakers of English on Taiwan, I
have never heard of anyone having a misunderstanding based on the use
of a contraction. There may be problems with writing for a foreign
audience, but this is not one of them.
Douglas Thayer
<douglas_thayer -at- smtplink -dot- syscom -dot- com -dot- tw>
Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.
______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: RE> Contractions & Traslat
Author: Karen Kay <karenk -at- NETCOM -dot- COM> at smtplink-syscom
Date: 4/7/95 6:18 AM
> Several Asian languages have no contractions at all making the
> translation difficult.
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... I only know two Asian languages, one not well.
The lack of contractions is the least of the problems when translating
from English. I don't do English -> Japanese translation because I'm
not a native speaker of Japanese, but the problems I have going from
Japanese to English have largely to do with the fact that the subject
of a sentence is rarely identified, and the fact that Japanese doesn't
have tenses. I imagine those problems would be the same going the
other way.
