On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, John Jenkins wrote:

> On Dec 13, 2003, at 12:29 PM, Patrick Chew wrote:
> > The whole situation of reading/writing "Mandarin" is true,
> > BUT, I
> > would argue that people internally _translate_ into their own
> > vernacular,
> > where vernacular/colloquial forms are substituted in on not only the
> > lexical, but also syntactic, level, when read.
> This is an interesting idea. I'd love to see someone follow through on
> this. My daughter and I were discussing the issue today, when I noted
> to her that I've had no luck in finding Chinese audiobooks. She
> wondered if a Cantonese speaker doing an audiobook would, in fact, read
> the text as written (using Cantonese pronunciations), or translate to
> Cantonese as they read.

I bought a Cantonese version of those children's book and cassette tape
sets around 1995--specifically, Disney's _Beauty and the Beast_. It
turned out that the text in the book was the usual written Chinese, but
the contents of the tape was in colloquial Cantonese, and not a
Cantonese-pronounced version of the book's contents. I'm not sure how
useful the product really is; my experience with English versions of such
products is that the tape matches the text.


Thomas Chan
tc31@...