Need help with translating a term into Japanese, Korean, or Chinese

[AFGNCAAP]

Figured this would be a good place to ask.

First, a bit of background info:

I'm trying to devise a name for another "Common" language for the folk of the southern realms IMC: the region's basically where samurai, ninjas, shugenjas, etc. come from IMC (like Kara-Tur in Toril).

I've figured out that the name I kinda want to use for the Common language of this realm will basically be something like "Common Tongue" or "Trade Language" in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. Perhaps even a mix of the above (like using the Korean word for "Trade" and the Japanese word for "Language", for example).

Thing is, I can't find a good translator that provides the results using the Latin alphabet. I often get the results in the native script for the languages, but I don't read/speak the languages so I can't provide a good translation of them into Latin letters.

I figured ENWorld may have members who are fluent in at least one of the aforementioned languages, so I'm asking if anyone here could provide me with any help on this.

Here's the words/terms I'm trying to find translations of. I'll provide individual words & phrases since I understand that there's the possibility that a phrase may translate differently than the individual words:

• Tongue
• Language
• Speech
• Common
• Trade
• "Common Tongue"
• "Trade Tongue"
• "Common Language"
• "Trade Language"
• "Common Speech"
• "Trade Speech"

I'd appreciate any help/info/answers/links you could provide.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Online Japanese/English dictionary

'Tongue' is shita, tan, kouzetsu.
'Language' is range-ji, go, gengo, kotoba, rangu.

 

[D.Shaffer]

Korean uses a phonetic alphabet*, so if you can get your hands on a pronunciation guide, it's not that hard to get a decently close English equivalent. (It's also got a pretty interesting history, and considering it was developed to be easy to learn to read makes it a pretty good basis for a trade language anyways, IMO. But then I'm biased )

HERE's a decent link.

*That is, when they're not using Chinese characters.

 

[Creeping Death]

Figured this would be a good place to ask.

• Tongue
• Language
• Speech
• Common
• Trade
• "Common Tongue"
• "Trade Tongue"
• "Common Language"
• "Trade Language"
• "Common Speech"
• "Trade Speech"

I'd appreciate any help/info/answers/links you could provide.

My wife is asleep she would know better than I, below is japanese that I remember.

Tongue = shita
Common = futsu (more like normal)
Common tongue = Common language would be nihongo (Japanese)
Language = gengo

Keigo is polite speech, basically what you would use when talking to someone above you. For example, when talking about yourself to your friends you would use the word ore or boku, but when talking to the Emporer or your boss, and you were male, you would use the word watakushi. Women would use the word atashi. Most of the time though, you would refer to yourself in the third person.

kokan suru is "to trade" but that is more like I'll trade my sandwich for your cookies kind of trade. I'm not sure if it applies to business in general.

Here are some extra that might help

Cargo = nimotsu
Money = okane
Gold = kin
Silver = gin
Horse = uma
Deer = shika
Idiot = umashika (horse and deer put together, had it explained once but forgot)
tanbo (pronounce the n like an m) = rice field
village = mura

Pronunciation guide:

a is always pronounced ah
i is always pronounced like ee
u is always pronounced like the oo in food.
e is always pronounced like eh
o is always pronounced oh.

shi sounds like she

r's are rolled once, this is why they mix up their r's and l's.

Japanse only has 1 solid consonant sound and that is n. All the rest have to have a vowel follow. For example in english I say hall, they would try to say it haru. That's because of their alphabet.

the first 5 letters are a, i , u , e, o. The next 5 are ka, ki, ku, ke, ko. Ka is one letter, it is very hard for them to break the k away from the a, when they first learn to speak english.

Gotta go, that's all for now.

Later,

 

[AFGNCAAP]

Thanks for all of the info. The Online Japanese/English dictionary has helped quite a bit. Seeing the words provided so far, I'm tempted to just go with "Gengo" for the language's name (which seems like a good in-joke--"What language do you speak?" "Language.").

There was one word according to this site that I stumbled across as an option: jingo.

Basically, I took a word for "people," jin, and added a word for "language/word," go.

Now, according to the site, jingo can mean "human language" OR "behind others, losing out to others." Is this accurate? Which meaning of jingo is more prevalent for native speakers? Is there any negative connotation with using jingo to mean "language" as compared to gengo?

Also, any options for good English-to-Chinese or English-to-Korean translators that give results of Chinese/Korean words using English letters? I'd like to have such a resource available for working on potential place names & whatnot.

 

[DarkKestral]

Frankly, I wouldn't use jingo as the 'trade language' name for any group that's mostly American or who speak English, as English uses the term jingoism and jingoistic to describe a person or a group being nationalist in nature. It's one of those random bad names you soemtimes get. It would make sense to a native speaker of Japanese, but an American might take it wrongly. However, I love the idea of using okane-go as the name. You could even have a punnish proverb that is pretty much 'money talks' too as a common saying.. same for 'now you're speaking my language'.. would be very good for a culture where bribery is common. (I dunno how your world is, but I could see some of the more criminal elements having sayings like that, even in a society that would otherwise be against bribery)

 

[Aeric]

Babelfish is a fun little translating tool, but it's not always 100% accurate. Still, if all you're looking for are names for a game, it might be for you.

 

[AFGNCAAP]

Frankly, I wouldn't use jingo as the 'trade language' name for any group that's mostly American or who speak English, as English uses the term jingoism and jingoistic to describe a person or a group being nationalist in nature. It's one of those random bad names you sometimes get. It would make sense to a native speaker of Japanese, but an American might take it wrongly. However, I love the idea of using okane-go as the name. You could even have a punnish proverb that is pretty much 'money talks' too as a common saying.. same for 'now you're speaking my language'.. would be very good for a culture where bribery is common. (I dunno how your world is, but I could see some of the more criminal elements having sayings like that, even in a society that would otherwise be against bribery)

Well, I was aware of the term "jingo" in the English sense, and the negative connotations there. I was considering "Jingo" because of this for humorous effect, mainly. However, since there were 2 possible definitions in Japanese for the term, I wasn't sure which one was more prevalent/used. Also, I wasn't sure of the "weight" of the term in Japanese, if you will--I didn't know if any bad connotation in Japanese was so bad that it'd be rude to use at all (i.e., non-Eric's Grandma friendly language, just in Japanese rather than English). I just wanted to ask people actually knowledgeable in the language if that was the case, rather than rely on just an online translator.

I sorta saw "Jingo" as having potential joke-wise for those knowledgeable about the Japanese language, as well as for those aware of the word in the English language (a potential cross-cultural punchline, that is). And, to play with the English connotation, it'd be a commentary on the ancient empire that dominated that area ages ago & helped establish the language as the dominant/"Common" language for the entire region.

Also, I was considering getting Korean and Chinese words/terms as well for a mix-n-match that would sound sorta-kinda authentic (and to step away from Asian cultures = Japanese culture with this fantasy setting), but wouldn't really mean anything in just 1 language. I wanted to be able to generate serious terms and phrases using other languages (and not just joke terms all around). The joke-stuff would be little humor "Easter eggs" scattered throughout the game.

Babelfish is a fun little translating tool, but it's not always 100% accurate. Still, if all you're looking for are names for a game, it might be for you.

Babelfish was one of the first resources I tried, actually. Results are given in the written characters of the language it's translated into (which I can't read at all) instead of using the English alphabet to depict the term, so it's not useful for me.

 

[kromelizard]

Figured this would be a good place to ask.

First, a bit of background info:

I'm trying to devise a name for another "Common" language for the folk of the southern realms IMC: the region's basically where samurai, ninjas, shugenjas, etc. come from IMC (like Kara-Tur in Toril).

I've figured out that the name I kinda want to use for the Common language of this realm will basically be something like "Common Tongue" or "Trade Language" in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. Perhaps even a mix of the above (like using the Korean word for "Trade" and the Japanese word for "Language", for example).

Thing is, I can't find a good translator that provides the results using the Latin alphabet. I often get the results in the native script for the languages, but I don't read/speak the languages so I can't provide a good translation of them into Latin letters.

I figured ENWorld may have members who are fluent in at least one of the aforementioned languages, so I'm asking if anyone here could provide me with any help on this.

Here's the words/terms I'm trying to find translations of. I'll provide individual words & phrases since I understand that there's the possibility that a phrase may translate differently than the individual words:

• Tongue
• Language
• Speech
• Common
• Trade
• "Common Tongue"
• "Trade Tongue"
• "Common Language"
• "Trade Language"
• "Common Speech"
• "Trade Speech"

I'd appreciate any help/info/answers/links you could provide.

Chinese is pretty much the perfect language for these kinds of distinctions. They even use the term "common tongue." I'll give you answers both in the form of the pinyin romanization and characters (which will probably not display unless you have the proper MS character support or are using a Mac, also they will be the simplified charcaters used in the PRC and not the traditional used in Taiwan becuse I do not know the traditional characters), be forwarned, pinyin is only sometimes pronounced the way it appears to be. For example "q?" is pronounced more like "chee." The ins and outs of understanding pinyin are too long to go into here. I'd use wade-giles, since it parses better for english speakers, but unfortunately nobody really uses it anymore so I am much less familiar with it.

The accent marks I am including because they indicate the tone used for the word, which is essential in Chinese for distinguishing a word from it's 50 or more homophones. My quick and dirty primer is this.

"-" indicates a high tone, probnounce as if you were singing the word.
"/" indicates a rising tone, pronounce as if you were asking a question.
"^(upside down)" indicates a falling-rising tone, pronounce as if you were saying this sarcastically, but more subtly and a little bit longer."
"\" indicates a falling tone, pronounce as if the word has an exclamation point.

[*]Tongue = ?? y? yán

[*]Language = ?? y? wén (I presume you're looking for a term to incorporate spoken and writing systems?)

[*]Speech = ?? k?u y?

[*]Common =
[*]Trade = ?? sh?ng yè

[*]"Common Tongue" = ??? p? t?ng huà

[*]"Trade Tongue" = ?? sh?ng huà (best guess on my part for a simple term, though if I were forced to say this in a way an actual chinese speaker would understand then I would use the phrase "sh?ng yè de y? yán")

[*]"Common Language" = see "Common Tongue"

[*]"Trade Language" = in this case I would use the phrase ????? sh?ng yè de y? yán

[*]"Common Speech" = same as before

[*]"Trade Speech" = same as "Trade Tongue"

Hope this all helps.

 

[kromelizard]

Hey look, the forum software doesn't understand the characters, should have expected that. Let me clean it up.


[*]Tongue = yuyan

[*]Language = yuwen (I presume you're looking for a term to incorporate spoken and writing systems?)

[*]Speech = kouyu

[*]Common = putong

[*]Trade = shangye

[*]"Common Tongue" = putonghua

[*]"Trade Tongue" = shanghuà (best guess on my part for a simple term, though if I were forced to say this in a way an actual chinese speaker would understand then I would use the phrase "shangye de yuyan")

[*]"Common Language" = see "Common Tongue"

[*]"Trade Language" = in this case I would use the phrase "shangye de yuyan"

[*]"Common Speech" = same as before

[*]"Trade Speech" = same as "Trade Tongue"