repost in UTF-7 (Re: Chinese address)

[Richard Thieme]

The previous one was as well but I forgot to indicate it in case someone had
problems reading it.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Thieme" <rdth...@gol.com>
To: <hon...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, December 25, 2009 6:55 PM
Subject: Chinese address

>I need help converting a Chinese address into English. The address is as
> follows:
>
> 深圳市龙岗区中心城德政路19
>
> So far I Have Shenzhen City, and Longgan District, but am still working on
> the rest.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Richard Thieme
>
>
> --
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[Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven]

-On [20091225 11:19], Richard Thieme (rdth...@gol.com) wrote:
>The previous one was as well but I forgot to indicate it in case someone had
>problems reading it.

Actually, both of your email messages had 7 bit ISO 8859-1 as encoding.

So on my end it still showed as 'garbage' at least.

--
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai
イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン
http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/ | GPG: 2EAC625B
Your lunacy fits in neatly with my own, my very own...

[Richard Thieme]

OK, so in the future what should I do to have it not show as garbage on your
end? I know we have been over this before. I deliberately chose UTF-7 for
the second post, so I am not quite sure why it would have come out the way
it did on your end.

But even though I was able to read the simplified kanji on my end, it still
had the ISO-8859-1 in the content type setting.

Does this mean that the reason no one responded was that no one could read
my message?

I ran across a site http://www.mandarintools.com/email.html

Which fixes email text in garbled Chinese, and it worked on my previous
post.

Someone here (Alan Siegrist??) had a technique for doing this manually (it
involved copying to a text file and then doing something). I am sure I
copied down the information, but can't find it at the present.

Can anyone post it again? or respond to me offline?

Thanks,

Richard Thieme

[Kirill Sereda]

>> OK, so in the future what should I do to have it not show as garbage on your end?

UTF-7 sounds kind of exotic. Why not UTF-8? While UTF-7 is part of the Unicode standard, is _not_ recommended by the Internet Mail Consortium; UTF-8 is both standard and recommended.

"Fortunately, very few vendors implemented UTF-7, and its use is strongly discouraged in Internet mail."
http://www.imc.org/imcr-010.html

Kirill

[Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven]

-On [20091226 06:37], Richard Thieme (rdth...@gol.com) wrote:
>OK, so in the future what should I do to have it not show as garbage on your
>end? I know we have been over this before. I deliberately chose UTF-7 for
>the second post, so I am not quite sure why it would have come out the way
>it did on your end.

UTF-7 is a bastard encoding to use, IIRC, UTF-8 in plain ASCII/ISO-8859-1
environments since Unicode support was not as widespread back in the day as
it is now.

Anno 2010 (since it's only a few days away): never use UTF-7, use UTF-8.

--
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai
イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン
http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/ | GPG: 2EAC625B

Life is just one damned thing after another...

[Wataru Tenga]

Jeroen wrote...

>> Anno 2010 (since it's only a few days away): never use UTF-7, use UTF-8.

Fine, but what Richard really wants to know is how to choose the encoding
when sending email. His messages were not even in UTF-7 as he thought.

Unfortunately, I don't remember how Outlook Express 6 works in this regard.
Does anyone else use that program, and know how to set the encoding of
outgoing mail using it?

Wataru Tenga, formerly adept at such things

[David J. Littleboy]

From: "Wataru Tenga" <wte...@gmail.com>

Just set the encoding from the Format menu. これはテストだ。

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

[Richard Thieme]

Does this do it?

深圳市龙岗区中心城德政路 11

----- Original Message -----
From: "David J. Littleboy" <dav...@gol.com>
To: <hon...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 26, 2009 8:25 PM
Subject: Re: repost in UTF-7 (Re: Chinese address)

>

[Richard Thieme]

changed back

[jmarc...@comcast.net]

Richard asked,

Does this do it?

深圳市龙岗区中心城德政路 11

That worked on my end.

The part you could not get reads "No. 11 Dezheng Road, Central Town".



John Marchioro

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

On Dec 26, 9:34 pm, jmarchi...@comcast.net wrote:
> The part you could not get reads "No. 11 Dezheng Road, Central Town".

This is something that's always bothered me: Why translate only the 中
心 into English? Doesn't that strike you as horribly inconsistent?
And for that matter, why translate any part of the address, like
"road" or "town"? Wouldn't the logical consequence of that approach
result in the same address being rendered differently in every
possible language? Should Chinese postal workers have to understand
every language in the world in order to do their jobs?

I would submit that the address would be most appropriately written in
plain pinyin:

11 Dezheng-lu, Zhongxin-cheng, Longgang-qu, Shenzhen-shi

Am I being needlessly pedantic? Is there an official recommendation
from the Chinese postal service for romanizing addresses? What are
your thoughts?

-Aaron Madlon-Kay

[jmarc...@comcast.net]

I wrote:

> The part you could not get reads "No. 11 Dezheng Road, Central Town".

And Aaron responded:

This is something that's always bothered me:  Why translate only the 中
心 into English?  Doesn't that strike you as horribly inconsistent?
And for that matter, why translate any part of the address, like
"road" or "town"?  Wouldn't the logical consequence of that approach
result in the same address being rendered differently in every
possible language? Should Chinese postal workers have to understand
every language in the world in order to do their jobs?

I would submit that the address would be most appropriately written in
plain pinyin:

11 Dezheng-lu, Zhongxin-cheng, Longgang-qu, Shenzhen-shi

Am I being needlessly pedantic?  Is there an official recommendation
from the Chinese postal service for romanizing addresses?  What are
your thoughts?

Aaron,

Well, we have the same issue with Japanese addresses, right? When translating a patent or contract, I generally use XXX-cho/machi, YYY-ku/shi, ZZZ-ken/fu and so on when I do the Japanese addresses, but I know that a lot of people prefer YYY-Ward/City and ZZZ-Prefecture and the rest.

In this Chinese case I gave what I found when I inputted Richard's address into Google China; some Googits for it came up, and I figured that was enough evidence that it is in current use. And I do not think that there is much problem with Chinese mail carriers needing to know Uzbek or Telugu or whatever, since as a practical matter no one would ever use romanized words in such a language when addressing a letter to China. Like it or not, English is today's lingua franca, and that includes China.

I would bet that the pinyin version would be adequate for most purposes, though there is of course one additional problem with Chinese, namely that because Chinese is a tonal language any given syllable in pinyin can have several dozens of characters corresponding to it, certainly more than the average Japanese on-yomi rendering. Just look up "yi" in a pinyin dictionary; there are maybe 75 or 80 characters for this syllable, because the 4 tones in Mandarin multiply the possibilities for homonyms (Mandarin is notoriously bad in this regard, because the consonantal endings found in other dialects like Cantonese have mostly been dropped; no terminal "k" or "t" or "p" like one finds in Cantonese or Hokkienese). While the number of characters pronounced "yi" is maddening, it is not that extreme of a case. "Cheng" and zhong" and "de" each have more than a dozen characters with that respective pronunciation, so the possibilities of misunderstanding with pinyin cannot be underestimated as well, especially when the address is new or a bit unusual in some other way.

FWIW, I have mailed cards, letters and packages to friends in China and Taiwan and used all manner of systems - han4zi4, pinyin, Wade-Giles and English. Never had a problem once. I wish the US Postal Service were as reliable.


John Marchioro

[pls]

test

.

.
--

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