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Re: Need a translated Chinese name for Debian (UTF-8 mail)



On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 05:30:13PM +0800, yanzg wrote:

> things, and I think everyone does. Thus,  avoiding this "connotation" 
> should be of significant importance for Debian promotion. Since I do not 
> see the reason and possibility to change the word "Debian" itself, the 
> only suggestion is to give it a translated Chinese name.

I happen to have chinese-speaking people around, and their suggestion is
to just leave "Debian" unstranslated such as in "Debian 真棒".  If you
pronounce it with the more used 'deh-bian' instead of 'dah-bian', you
probably manage to avoid that "shitty" confusion :)

I've been told however that in China there is a tendency in replacing
foreign words with similar-sounding characters, while for example in
Taiwan they tend to leave names untranslated.  Since the translation in
characters would be mainly a chinese issue (pronunciation is involved,
so we're also talking of Mandarin only[1]), it may be a good idea to
run this discussion inside the Chinese Debian community and then
annoucing (and discussing) the results with zh_CN translators.


Ciao,

Enrico


[1] Chinese characters, traditional or simplified, are used to a
different extent and with different prononciations in various asian
languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean and
lots of others, including local dialects.
--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>

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