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:
With our Chinese language translation software you can easily translate
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.
Also Translate other
Languages: English - Spanish - French - Japanese - German - Portuguese
-
Italian - Korean - - Dutch - Arabic
- Dutch - Swedish - Russian |
Fast 
