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Chinese will rule the World Wide Web | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4866 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 97 of 121 12 August 2011 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Don't forget also that each language has its own vast literature. One can't help but wonder how well that literature can be translated from English into Chinese, or from Chinese into English. There's no way Mark Twain could ever be translated into Chinese without completely losing it's character. It seems to me, however, from translations I've seen of old Chinese literature like the Tao Te Ching, it is quite possible to translate that into English without losing any of the ambiguity and vagueness of the original Chinese. One only needs to pick up ten or twelve such translations and compare them to know that whatever the original author of the Tao Te Ching intended, nobody today can come even close to agreeing on what those Chinese passages actually mean.
While a translation of Mark Twain into, say, Spanish, or Don Quijote in English, would lose a lot of the flavor of the original, the essential message, sentence by sentence, would be preserved. It seems that in the case of the Tao Te Ching, however, that even the essential message in the original is either hopelessly vague, hopelessly ambiguous, or both. In other words, it's my impression that English or Spanish can accommodate the literature of Chinese, but that Chinese cannot accommodate the literature of English or Spanish without unacceptable loss of meaning. (Disclaimer: I don't know Chinese, but I have read many mutually incompatible translations of various Chinese classics into English leaving me with the impression that nobody is quite sure WHAT a given Chinese sentence actually means.) @nway: you said "I'll never understand this obsession with the tonal aspect. English speakers use tones all the time." Yes, but in English tones are used for emphasis not meaning, AND tones are always optional, and often idiosyncratic. --gary 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5416 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 98 of 121 12 August 2011 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The Tao Te Ching is a 2,000-year-old cryptic philosophical text. Try independently translating a 2,000-year-old philosophical text of the Germanic linguistic family into Chinese twelve different times, and I can assure you, you will get twelve different translations.
In other words, your entire argument here is that two completely unrelated languages don't translate well into each other, and that this is only to be considered a problem for one of them, even though it's a reciprocal dynamic. Are you really that surprised that two European languages translate into each other more aptly than a language that originated on the other side of the planet?
Perhaps you should add another disclaimer that you've yet to read multiple Chinese translations of various English literary classics. I can assure you, a dozen independent translations of James Joyce into Chinese will be every bit as cryptic.
The point is that they're tones and we use them. The fact that they're used for different purposes is irrelevant to the argument that English speakers can't comprehend the concept of tones. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Aquila Triglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5482 days ago 104 posts - 128 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German Studies: French | Message 99 of 121 12 August 2011 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The world is changing and the increasing economical but also political importance of countries like China, Brazil,
India and Russia makes their languages also more important. I'm very curious what happens in the future: which language is the new English? Is there a role for Esperanto or another, maybe a new constructed language? Will technology make learning foreign languages superfluous? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5416 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 100 of 121 12 August 2011 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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English won't be replaced in the West. Neither will there ever be a role for Esperanto or another constructed language with the masses. But the world's diversity of languages are likely to be coalesced into a half dozen or so super-regional lingua francas. What language these different regions outside of the West use to communicate with each other is likely to be English for at least the next decade or so, but nothing is certain after that. If China assumes the role the US did in the latter half of the 20th century, Russia and Brazil or Japan and Venezuela needn't necessarily communicate with each other in English.
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| Carlucio Triglot Groupie BrazilRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4859 days ago 70 posts - 113 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishC1, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 101 of 121 12 August 2011 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It depends how much they estimate their own language and speak it whenever they can,if the chineses adopt English as they second language chinese will never rule.
A interesting statistic about twitter. 
Source: http://www.webecologyproject.org/page/2/ 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6035 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 102 of 121 12 August 2011 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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There is also a Chinese twitter:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/jul/15/weibo-t witter-china 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Rikyu-san Diglot Senior Member Denmark Joined 5529 days ago 213 posts - 413 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: German, French | Message 103 of 121 12 August 2011 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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See this article (in Danish)
Danish engineers must learn to speak Mandarin The key part of the article is this paragraph (my translation):
This means that it is already the case that Danish engineers are not hired. Because even though they are competent engineers, they only speak English. If Danish engineers learn to speak Mandarin, they will probably also learn to use Mandarin on the Internet and thereby add to the Internet penetration of Mandarin. Edited by Rikyu-san on 12 August 2011 at 9:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Zerkezhi Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5421 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Spanish | Message 104 of 121 13 August 2011 at 12:30am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't think that Chinese will "take over" as the Internet language No. 1 anytime soon (if ever). Considering that every piece of software and programming language is based in the English language and todays systems are inherently incapable of accepting non-western characters on any lower-system-level, it seems to me pretty unlikely. English is needed on such fundamental levels in IT and pretty much every other field of science / daily life areas (not all of course) that it'd take decades to replace it...or a very, very enthusiastic Chinese maniac (will the Cinese invent their own OS and programming languages capable of accepting nothing but Chinese? Can't put it past their government, but even that will be greeted by minimal success and facing heavy opposition from nearly every Western Country, as well as the majority of the east). As long as these parts are controlled by English, so will the majority of the Internet.
Enough Chinese also learn English as a secondary language and use it actively on the Internet, further decreasing its momentary and future use. Also: Due to the heavy censorship the Chinese government imposes on Internet access, the Chinese have very limited access to the World Wide Web as a whole, making it nearly impossible for them to penetrate every/the majority of fields. Edited by Zerkezhi on 13 August 2011 at 12:32am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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