Is it me or is there a slowly increasing trend of people posting stuff in Mandarin on here and not translating it for the masses? It would be more friendly if you’d kindly post a direct translation please after you write Chinese into the middle of a sentence. Back when all this was green fields and we dinosaurs got to rip each other new ones on an hourly basis you would have been eviscerated for dropping Mandarin into your post without translating it. But we are all polite and grown up now. So could I please ask, if you do need/want to post some Mandarin in with your English postings would you kindly also provide a direct translation into English? People who are imbeciles, like myself, would be much happier, and those who are trying to improve their Mandarin would benefit from some new language input.
I think most people do it when there is no equivalent english phrase, and it’s normally only done with common phrases/simple chinese that anybody who’s, ahem, been here a while ought to recognise.
[quote=“ceevee369”]I think my reply in the related thread explained the reason behind. No offense.
I know it is not a personal critcism.
But DO try yourself using fu***-up on-line translators and see what comes out of it - Gabberish junk unfortunatly not worth posting.[/quote]
Your post in the police mob thing simply prompted me to start this thread, Ceevee, old chap. I had been mulling it over in the back of my mind for a while and your post simply provided the reminder/impetus for me. No offence meant to you or to anyone. Just a polite request that things get translated please.
It’s actually more the posts that go along the lines of…
So yeah I was talking to this person the other day about the topic this thread is discussing. So I said to him, “Hey, why do you do this thing?” And he replied, “INSERT LONG MANDARIN SENTENCE.” And so I was like, WTF. Right guys?
It’s the ones where you need to understand Mandarin to really understand the gist of the whole post. I’m all for people speaking Mandarin, no probs at all. But I’d guess that most of us fall somewhere between the ranks of window licker and doorknob humper when it comes to Mandarin proficiency. I personally would prefer to be able to understand the whole post, or have the parts of the post written in Mandarin translated at some point.
Postscript: For some reason you cannot capitalize the word Mandarin on the flob. Curious.
Some style nazis will tell you that a people (eg., the English) should have a capital letter, but a language (eg., english) should not. Could be wrong about that - maybe the spellchecker thinks you’re trying to write about Whitehall mandarins or mandarin oranges.
Of course for anyone feeling the need to post in Mandarin that Maoman fella has created a Chinese forum over at his new site. Not plugging it, don’t know if it’s going anywhere; but it’s there for you if you needs it.
Those people would be dead wrong.[/quote]
Yeah, seems weird to me too. It’s a proper noun, so it gets capitalized. Just something I’ve heard from time to time and wondered if it might be programmed into the autochecker. Anyway, I misunderstood what superking was saying (as above). Dunno why we have an autocorrect anyway, especially since half the people here are teachers and ought to be able to spell.
Done testing.
I now remember that this is the Forumosa “build-in auto corrector” who’s doing this tric.
Try to put some names of towns being slight uncorrect and you’ll see what happens
It can be used for “boffins, learned people, those in the know, experts on a topic or in a position of bureaucratic authority”, etc, and that’s where the word as the descriptor of the language of the court bureaucracy came from.
Perhaps.
There’s also “mandarins”, as in oranges from China, though some spell that with a terminal letter ‘e’.
BUt on topic.
Stop using bloody Mandarin-only quotes because the vast majority of punters on 'ere can’t understand and won’t be able to for ever (and couldn’t be assed learning Chinese either). It’s plain rude. If you can read it well enough to know what it’s talking about, then post a friggin translation.
[quote=“urodacus”]
Stop using bloody Mandarin-only quotes because the vast majority of punters on 'ere can’t understand and won’t be able to for ever (and couldn’t be assed learning Chinese either). It’s plain rude. If you can read it well enough to know what it’s talking about, then post a friggin translation.[/quote]
They could start their own show-off thread where they write to each other in Chinese and have monthly competitions to see who’s the most “assimilated”.
[quote=“jimipresley”][quote=“urodacus”]
Stop using bloody Mandarin-only quotes because the vast majority of punters on 'ere can’t understand and won’t be able to for ever (and couldn’t be assed learning Chinese either). It’s plain rude. If you can read it well enough to know what it’s talking about, then post a friggin translation.[/quote]
They could start their own show-off thread where they write to each other in Chinese and have monthly competitions to see who’s the most “assimilated”. [/quote]
I’m not so sure it’s about showing off or intellectual snobbery. Some newer posters are able to converse fluently in both languages, but the majority of us just see squiggly lines and incomprehensible sections of posts. As this is an English forum it would be polite if these squiggly squares could be translated into something more meaningful for the majority. It just hasn’t been pointed out (or rammed down their throats as in the old days) that this would be appreciated.
