In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

[GRG55]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

...I find that difficult to believe. I am sure the Chinese may have felt the same way about European languages had they travelled here between 400AD and 1200AD. "Those European languages are so simple and backward they haven't even got a word for gunpowder. And their money is this heavy metal stuff. I don't think they know what a printing press is yet!" Back in the day all of these inventions must have been highly technical and complex for the time and the Chinese language was able to adapt/grow/add new words as and when needed. Chinese is very amenable to loan words, so if the word doesn't exist in their own language they will just use the English one with a Mandarin twist. They just need to understand the vocabulary first.

English became the Lingua Franca (the French probably thought there was something superior about French when that phrase was coined) because of the economic/military dominance of firstly the UK and then the US. Already in Asian countries some students are choosing to learn Mandarin instead of English. This will accelerate if China does manage to provide opportunity which is admittedly far from a sure thing.

We aren't in 400AD or 1200AD. I am sure that given enough time any language can "adapt". But as things stand today, and likely for some considerable time to come, it is what it is...

[konj]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

I've spent my whole career in petroleum and mining. Both involve massive amounts of technical writing and reports. These require enormous and detailed vocabulary. Think, for example, of the requirements in a geological study to describe in minute detail various geological strata, rock types, and rock conditions to accurately describe for another geologist, who may be reading the report years or decades later, exactly what has been drilled from deep within the earth.

With rising nationalism in the resource sector worldwide, which really accelerated in the 1970s, it has become a commonplace requirement that reports and documents have to be submitted to government authorities in the local language of whatever jurisdiction one happens to be operating in...even when the official language that the government operates in is not the "working language" in that country [which it often isn't for reasons which become obvious very quickly on the ground ].

My observation is the result of having to constantly deal with this, "both ways", over the years and around the world. A few brief examples:

• Translating an engineering technical report or a geological study into one of the Latin derived languages isn't too difficult. Operating in certain parts of Canada, reports have to be delivered in French...and it's common to just leave in the English words whenever there isn't a specific and detailed French alternative [then again, half the English language seems to have come from the French in the first place :cool:].
• Over the last few years I have been involved in a mining venture in one of the Central Asian republics [former Soviet Union]. Although the conditions under which the Russian scientists, engineers and geologists worked were primitive by our standards, the old Russian language reports are the most detailed, precise and clear compared to the more recent stuff we have had to deal with in a myriad of other languages including Korean and Chinese.
• Translating technical or legal documents to or from Arabic is almost hopeless. In some Middle East countries, such as Egypt, Arabic documents are mandatory...and many of the staff, especially lawyers, in the Ministries and State owned companies [with which one must deal] are not fluent in any language other than Arabic. We try to get around this by having a two language contract document with clauses side-by-side in two columns, but huge amounts of time and money get burned up trying to deal with this because Arabic simply does not have the breadth of vocabulary. I once asked a good Arab friend of mine why his language was so hopeless for the modern world. His cheeky answer was that Arabic was a language devoted to writing poetry, since that is what his nomadic bedouin ancestors used to do out in the desert at night as they stared at the stars for inspiration.
• My experience with German also comes from working in Central Asia. Stalin deported east Europe Germans to the sparsely populated steppes of Central Asia after WWII [my chief geologist has a German surname and is still completely fluent in the language, even though he has never been anywhere near Germany].

The above isn't intended to be an exhaustive description of how I came about my previous conclusion - and it could be that some find those observations about the importance of language offensive. But if the English translations of user manuals for Chinese made electrical consumer goods is any indication, there's a serious challenge moving between the two languages...;)

Back in my college years in Canada in early 1990s, I used to moonlight as a Russian-English technical translator for a couple of Calgary based oil companies. Helped me offset some of my student loans...

I remember working on some geological texts from 1970s. Most of them were typed on a mechanical type writer, some handwritten but the amount of detail was truly excruciating.

[GRG55]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

Agree, and the Chinese are extremely concerned about this. Chinese set up Hanban expanding the Confucius Institute program.

http://english.hanban.edu.cn/kzxy.php

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepu...guage0307.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/ed...21chinese.html

This is all to the good. The goals of the Confucius Institute sound much like many other similar institutions such as Alliance Française.

They are improving fast. Actually I would even suspect that by now, there are more proficient English readers and writers in China than in India. But most can't speak due to the lack of practice.

In a globalizing world the boundaries between a lot of things, including languages, blurs. I learned French as a second language, and never could get out of mentally "processing" what I was hearing back into English [while watching French language television for example]. Several of my nieces and nephews learned English and French at the same time. They whiz through the television dial between languages, and change languages back and forth in mid-sentence without pause when speaking to each other...it's just as though it's all one language to them. I can never do that.

The precision with which things need to be described is most demanding in technical work and in legal contracts. Even in English there is ample room for "error" - witness the handsome living so many U.S. lawyers make arguing about what the words in a contract really mean...;)

I do not know if this applies to Mandarin, but any language where the meaning of a significant amount of the vocabulary is dependent on the context within which the words are used [and Arabic is one language that falls into that catagory], appears to degrade the precision with which one can craft unambiguous technical and legal communications.

[bill]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

I do not know if this applies to Mandarin, but any language where the meaning of a significant amount of the vocabulary is dependent on the context within which the words are used [and Arabic is one language that falls into that catagory], appears to degrade the precision with which one can craft unambiguous technical and legal communications.

They call it Simplified. :rolleyes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese

After the retraction of the second round of simplification, the PRC stated that it wished to keep Chinese orthography stable. Years later in 2009, the Chinese government released a major revision list which included 8300 characters.

[touchring]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

Chinese is very amenable to loan words, so if the word doesn't exist in their own language they will just use the English one with a Mandarin twist. They just need to understand the vocabulary first.

Nowadays it is common to use the English word itself, no need to transliterate.

I do not know if this applies to Mandarin, but any language where the meaning of a significant amount of the vocabulary is dependent on the context within which the words are used [and Arabic is one language that falls into that catagory], appears to degrade the precision with which one can craft unambiguous technical and legal communications.

If you are referring to contextual meaning, no, it doesn't apply to Mandarin because the Chinese words are specific than English equivalents, due to the way words are formed in the Chinese language.

For example, the English word 'finance' can be translated into a couple of distinct forms, depending on the context:

pinyin - translation

jin-rong - 'finance' as in finance industry. 'jinrong-jie' translates to 'financial world'

cai-jing - 'finance' used in the topic of finance itself, e.g. 'caijing-wang' translates to 'financial website'.

li-cai - 'finance' as in the act of managing finance

cai-wu - 'finance' as in financial affairs and matters - 'caiwu-guwen' translates to 'financial consultant'

[medved]

Re: In 15 years China won't need any EU or US or Japanese imports, what will happen then?

... any language where the meaning of a significant amount of the vocabulary is dependent on the context within which the words are used [and Arabic is one language that falls into that catagory], appears to degrade the precision with which one can craft unambiguous technical and legal communications.

Dependence on context applies to *any* language. This is not the difference between, say, English and Russian. Here is the difference.

1. Let's be precise in naming the language. We are not talking about "English" here, we are talking about "American".

2. Americans are much less conservative than "traditional English" speakers in terms of maintaining the language, they twist and turn it as they like, create many slang variations and many nicknames for new things (tech or not).

3. The whole industries were created or significantly developed over the last 100 years, when US was acknowledged world leader in technology, so Americans were the ones naming the new things, creating the new slang, new words and new notions. It is very easy to use a new word for a new notion in the beginning, later they may split. In the original language it is masked by using the original word in different context, but the translator really gets in a tough situation when he needs to find the appropriate translation. In many cases the new word is not translated but transliterated (in case of Russian) or left as it is in its Latin spelling (in case of e.g. German).

4. The Russian language uses quite a lot of these transliterated words. You can trace the industrial history by studying them. E.g. most of transliterations in mining and mechanical engineering (19th century) come from German. Most transliterations in electronics and software come from American.

So, sometimes not being the original language is beneficial, it gives you the ability to use foreign transliterated word for its new tech meaning and use the old native word for its traditional meaning. E.g. the english word ‘file’ is used for both traditional office paper files and computer files (‘file system’). In Russian the transliterated ‘file’ (файл) is only used for computers.