I've done a search on 'electronic | translators' across the site, and came up with nothing relevant, so here goes:

I'm wondering if, for those of us who don't speak mandarin or Cantonese, bringing along an electronic translator would be useful - I imagine that basic negotiations could be carried on in sign language, but I'd like to go a bit beyond that. I'm thinking of one of the talking models that actually pronounces the translated phrase for you. I'll probably try to learn a bit too, but I don't have a great deal of time to do that, and learning languages - let alone tonal languages - isn't my strong point.

I've been doing some research of Lingo products, but most reviewers seem to think they're crap, particularly on the pronunciation front.

Any recommendations, thoughts etc.?

[ Last edited by  ADB at 22-10-2009 01:00 ]

I have one inherited off my dad and they are terrible, in that you type out something in english and it will give you 2-3 sentences of what it could mean in Cantonese or mandarin.

For example you type in a word like 'pie' and the chinese voice remarks on every possible pie there is unless you mark the text you want to read which sort of defeats the point if you were able to read....

Heh ask the WG toi use hers an awful lot of the younger ones seem to have them , even old seasoned pros have them like happy.

Obviously the biggest limitations are slangs & naughty words.  At best, it would be difficult & cumbersome in my opinion.

just like trying to read the 141 WG reviews, dealing with normal everyday slangish Cantonese conversation will not work well with translators.  Translators, just like a translator on the web such as Babelfish, will use more standard Cantonese, which most people don't use, except on newscasts. Sort of like the difference between Shakespere English and American English.

For Mandarin, the translators work a lot better.

I personally like the gum G deen... no idea what it is in English, but when you put in cunnilingus, its fucking hilarious!

Thanks all. Yes, I was a bit concerned at how clumsy it would be, so it would only be a backup. Also was pretty sure it wouldn't handle the slang, which would be a problem I imagine. I guess if I see a model that looks half decent and doesn't cost too much I might pick it up, otherwise just rely on sign language etc.

Because I know how to speak Cantonese but not Mandarin, and because I cannot read any Chinese, when I chat with girls on QQ, I use a combination of Google Translator and CU Vocal to help me. This is best done on a computer, rather than on a mobie...

What I do is I type into Google Translator what I want to say, it gives me the simplified Chinese text, I paste that into CU Vocal to hear it read out in Cantonese so I can verify it makes sense and isn't gibberish, modify the sentence further if it needs tweaking (swapping the words around to sound more natural or sometimes by going back to Google Translator to rephrase), then paste it into the chat box.

To understand the Chinese that comes back through the chat, I simply paste it into CU Vocal to hear it read out in Cantonese. If I still cannot understand it (which happens due to the Mandarin way of saying stuff being often different to Cantonese), I clarify by pasting it into the translator to get it into English text.

I've become quite adept at this now and the conversations are pretty fluid. I've even gotten a feel for the Translators so as to know how to phrase the initial English input to get more natural sounding translations out. Babelfish also works for translation, and there's also TTS which is another text-to-speech website, but it's not as useful for me since it only has Mandarin speech, not Cantonese.

And I know what you're thinking by now... The things I do to keep up relations, uh?!

i understand this bros problem so well, i spent 2 days looking for something like that in whole of HK and could not. I was getting so desperate to communicate with a WG in Electric Road, Tinhau who i was visiting every sunday. We started having a good thing going on but impossibly to talk to her and gets annoying not just for the naughty words which i understand are difficult to translate or plain funny. At the end in my desperation i bought a book to try to translate the text messages she was sending me (no i was not goijng to bring it to the bed ) and then i realised officially that i will never be able to translate chinese. I know some guys bring their laptops , i would be happy to do it while on holidays but doing it in HK just feels like work , might sound weird. So if any bros can pm me if finds one and which store pwold be

cool I'll have to check out CU Vocal.  I used to use PenPower's software but it didn't work all that well and I found that most girls in HK and China knew enough English for me to chat in Chinglish.

I recently installed a piece of software from youdao onto my smart phone, which does good cross translations.  The best part is that it works from finger written chinese characters as well, so you can give it to the girl to write characters and get a translation of that.  Very handy!  I have it on an HTC phone.

The i-phone is really an outstanding Mongering tool.  If you have one download the KTdict C-E.  If you enable the Chinese keyboard you can do eng/chin and chin/eng translation.  Really only works for single words - but it is comprehensive.  You can also access mongering sites like Sex141 on the run and use maps to find your way.  It really is a HK monger’s dream.  Everything you need and a phone to boot

Thanks again everyone. I think I have a partial solution, which is Mandarin phrases for the iPod. The package I got will let me learn some basic phrases at least, but as you would expect, none of the phrases are 141-oriented. I got a bit excited when I saw there was a section on 'Eating Out', but it turned out not to be about DATY. I might be able to get enough out of it to be able to book a HG and make some basic conversation when I get there, and that will probably be enough. The one I got is by McGrawHill, and cost < AUD30. There was another by Berlitz for about the same price, which had the advantage of displaying the phrases in Chinese characters, but the disc wasn't in the pack, so I left it for now. I can set up some playlists with basic phrases I might expect to try (Where are you from? I am from... etc.)

Edit: have just been reading through the manual, and apparently the McGrawHill package will also display the Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters if you have a 5G iPod.

[ Last edited by  ADB at 25-10-2009 18:23 ]

Electronic translators are fine for 2 or 3 character terms, but hopeless at translating complex sentences, and forget about slang. The interesting thing here is that while the better software-based translators like Google Translate usually do a decent job when translating between Western languages, they fail miserably with Chinese. Even for bilingual speakers, translating in and out of Chinese is as much an art as it is a technical skill.

Thanks for the TTS site. I've given that out to several beginning Mandarin students here in Taipei who were very happy to have the text to speech function.

Mandarin language learners might also want to check this site out:

http://pth.linqi.org/pyzd_biaozhu.html

You type/paste in sentences/paragraphs of Chinese text and it gives you the correct pronunciation of all the characters in pin yin with the tones.