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@Linguist_CIOL JUNE/JULY The Linguist 25 FEATURES need to be able to speak Mandarin to understand the written version. During the first half of the 20th century, China experienced a terrible period of invasion and civil war. This culminated in the defeat of the invading Japanese troops, and the breaking of China in two, with the Chinese Communist Party taking over mainland China and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) fleeing to the island of Taiwan, previously a Japanese colony. In Taiwan, the National Language of Imperial and Republican China, which by this point had been established as Mandarin and Standard Written Chinese, was utilised by the KMT government, replacing Japanese. Due to geographical, political and societal differences between Taiwan and China, and the amount of time they have been separated, differences in Mandarin pronunciation and vocabulary have developed – much as they have between the English of Britain and the USA. In mainland China, under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party, the term National Language was replaced with Common Speech（普通話）. In the 1950s, the government looked at reforming Chinese characters in order to make them easier to read and write with the intention of facilitating an increase in literacy rates in the country. In the past, character simplification had happened slowly and naturally. For instance, the radical 訁(a graphical component of a character) became讠and the character 門 became 门. However, with the new process led by government, more than 500 characters were simplified by the end of the 1960s, and another 2,000 by the mid-1970s. Using the right language The merits and demerits of simplification and its impact on literacy rates are disputed. Thanks to China's economic success in recent decades, the simplified character set is now the one that is most used by students of Mandarin. Indeed, Singapore pragmatically decided to adopt Simplified Characters officially in 1993 (although personal names can still be registered in Traditional Characters). This process of character simplification was not replicated in areas outside Communist Party control, with the exception of Singapore. This means that Traditional Characters continue to be used in Taiwan, British Hong Kong, Portuguese Macau and overseas Chinese communities the world over. As linguists working with Chinese languages, it is our duty to ensure a client not only gets what they are asking for, but also understands what they are asking for. We aren't doing our job properly when a client asks for a document to be translated into Chinese and we provide a text in Standard Mandarin using Simplified Characters, if it later transpires that they needed something for a local marketing campaign in Hong Kong, where colloquial Cantonese rendered in Traditional Characters would be most appropriate. Only through truly understanding clients' needs can we use the right language to help them facilitate communication. And facilitating communication, after all, is the purpose of language. Notes 1 Each Mandarin-speaking territory has its own way of saying 'Mandarin' due to linguistic and political conventions in the respective localities. CHINA TALKS The main languages spoken by region