An increasing number of companies have to deal with data from the world’s fastest emerging economy: China. And the big question in this issue is of course: How can we compare these “strange” Chinese characters with our own writing set?
Grammar and character set of our Western alphabet-languages (such as English, French, Dutch or German) differ tremendously from Mandarin Chinese (which is the language spoken by most in the People’s Republic of China and abroad. Mandarin is a tonal language with an ideographic character set. Almost all characters have a semantic and a phonetic component. The different pithch in the pronunciation eventually determines the signification
Complicated? Definitely. But what about the other way around? Have you ever thought about the difficulties the Chinese have to face when trying to convert their language into meaningful English?
This phenomenon is sometimes hilariously being illustrated by the many public signs in China used to inform foreign visitors or to help them finding their way around.
This is truly a delightful side-effect of internationalization. …. (more…)
Dealing with matching of persons or contact data in general, we are all aware that individuals can make use of abbreviations or nicknames as kind of synonyms for their name. Classic examples are the usage of the name Bill for the actual name William, or like my own father is using the name Mans while officially his name is Hermanus. Most matching engines make use of a kind of synonym table to take care of this. That can be done because within a culture or region the nicknames are quite often linked to the same names and people do not tend to use completely different official registered names.
