This is the kind of thing that, if you need it, you really need it
(...)
About Technical Chinese
As my friend Gavin Zhao once quipped, Chinese is a
wonderful language for poetry, but difficult for precise
technical communications. Fans of Randall Munroe’s XKCD
may have seen the “Up-Goer Five” blueprint comic (http://
xkcd.com/1133/), where complex technical concepts are
explained using only the “ten hundred” most common
English words.
Considering that 98% of Chinese is covered
with only 2,500 characters, and there are only 7,000 “general
use” characters, most technical terms in Chinese have to
be decomposed into idioms that are reminiscent of the UpGoer Five scenario.
For example, a resistor is 电阻, which means “electric
obstructor”, capacitor is 电容, which means “electric
container”, and a computer is 电脑, which means “electric
brain”. On the other hand, some concepts have names
which are simply phonetic loan words with no meaning,
such as the Schottky diode: 效特基二极管. The first three
characters are “xiào tè jī” (sounds like “shao tuh gee”),
which sound somewhat like “Schottky” but the characters
mean “resembles particular basis/foundation”; clearly
phonetic but no meaning. The last three characters mean
“two-pole tube”, which does make some sense.
And then
there are the pronunciation subtleties, such as 芯片号, “xīn
piàn hào” (which means an “IC’s part number” (literally
“core flat item’s number”), which with misplaced accents
sounds like 性偏好, “xìng piān hào” which means “sexual
12 The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen
preference”. No native speaker would ever mispronounce
or confuse the two, but a foreigner going up to a local
asking “What’s your chip’s part number?” could be heard
as “What’s your sexual preference?” if mispronounced and
taken out of context.
Even Mandarin speakers find it challenging to communicate
certain technical terms. Different idioms are used, for
example, between Taiwan and Shenzhen. There are other
differences across China depending upon the dialect and
context: academics will typically use more formal and
technically rigorous terms than a market trader or even an
engineer. For example, in the market the descriptive term 三
级管 (‘three-pole tube’) is sometimes used for a transistor,
instead of the academically accepted 晶体管 (‘crystal tube’).
Both of these could refer to a “metal oxide semiconductor
field effect transistor” (MOSFET), but there’s no uniform
system for abbreviating 金属-氧化物-半导体型场效应管
(that’s Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor
spelled out in Chinese characters). In this case, market
traders will often fall back to using English acronyms or
some local slang to refer to a given part.
For this book, I’ve worked with my Chinese friends to
produce translations that are targeted at the vernacular
of traders in the Hua Qiang electronics market (of which
many are from the city of Chaozhou (潮州市), and so speak a
common dialect). If you do happen to find any errors or have
suggestions for improvements, please send a note....
