Typing Chinese Characters for your Translation
Dictionary
Type Chinese Fonts or Characters on your
Keyboard
 Typing
Chinese - The standard way to type Chinese characters is to use
PINYIN. This is a way of typing with your regular English keyboard and
using Chinese Phonetics to type in the characters.
Example: if you change your Windows language keyboard settings for Chinese
Pinyin, you can then type in the word "store", which in Chinese
Pinyin is "shang-dian", you type in "shang-dian" and
it will display the Chinese characters for this word.
Pin·yin or pin·yin is pronouned as (pnyn, -yn)(part of
speech: noun)
This is a system for transliterating Chinese ideograms (characters) into the
Roman alphabet.
[Chinese (Mandarin) pn yn, to combine sounds into syllables : pn, to combine
+ yn, sound.]
Pinyin literally means "join (together) sounds" (a
less literal translation being "phoneticize", "spell" or "transcription")
in Chinese and usually refers to Hanyu Pinyin (phonemic notation and transcription
to Roman script) for Standard Mandarin Chinese.
Pinyin was approved in 1958 and adopted in 1979 by the government in the
People's Republic of China.
The main purpose of using pinyin in Chinese schools is to teach Mandarin
Chinese pronunciation. The Mandarin Chinese pronunciation of words is taught
in elementary school through the use of pinyin.
Since Pinyin uses the Roman alphabet it can make it easier to add words
to your tranlsation dictionary and gives you a good guide to pronouncing
Mandarin Chinese words.
To type in Pinyin you must first change your language settings in Windows
(control panel) and install the Chinese Fonts. After you change your keyboard
settings in windows you can then toggle between the Chinese Pinyin and the
English by hitting "Alt + shift".
PINYIN EXAMPLE:
English Word: baby girl:
Type in Chinese Pinyin: nv3 ying1
Results of Typing:
Here is more technical information at Microsoft that may help - http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/handson/user/IME_Paper.mspx
You will need to Install Chinese Fonts to see the actual Chinese
Characters
If you have Windows XP, go to the control panel, click on Regional and Language
Options. Once there click on the “Languages” tab and follow the steps to
install the East Asian Languages.
If you do not have Windows XP, can go to Windows Update and update your
languages to include the Asian Languages.
TIP: If you visit
a Chinese Website with Microsoft Internet Explorer, it will prompt you to
install the Chinese Fonts so you can view it properly. I usually go to Yahoo.com
and Find the Yahoo International link to visit a Chinese web page. This may
only update the fonts for Internet Explorer (your browser). If you go into
MS Word and do not see the fonts, install them through the Regional settings.
Chinese Character Encoding
Computers use encoding to display language characters. For Chinese
there are different encoding methods and sometimes this can cause display
problems. Chinese Translation software supports the most popular encoding
methods.
The following are common Chinese character encoding systems:
Ascii - used by US
and Canada.
Guobiao - used in
Mainland China and Singapore. All Guobiao standards are prefixed
by GB, example GB5
Big5 - used
in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, is a one or two byte encoding.
Unicode- is
becoming an industry standard and very successful at displaying
characters.
Having trouble translating Chinese text?
If a computer in singapore creates a letter written in chinese but
the computer or software they are working with uses a non standard
chinese encoding, then you will have problems with your translating
software recognizing the fonts.
Your Software could be causing Chinese Character Errors
There are other programs that use their own type of encoding, for
example Hotmail or Yahoo have decided to create their own mutated version
of the Chinese character. The solution is to copy the Chinese text
from an email into MS Word and then perform translation.
How can you fix this issue?
You can use a little trick to convert a non-standard asian character
by using Microsoft Word. If you copy and paste text from an Asian document
into MS Word, Windows will convert it to the correct encoding.
Chinese Translation Software:
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Chinese documents, email, chat, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations
and more! Our Chinese translation software will help you translate
Chinese to English and translate English to Chinese.
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Related Items:
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