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Updated Thursday, February 9, 2012 0:06 am TWN, The China Post news staff and CNA



	President Ma Ying-jeou, second right, inspects a website that incorporates a database on cross-strait language use launched in Taipei, yesterday. The president said the database will serve as a platform for cultural exchanges across the Taiwan Strait and boost mutual understanding. (CNA) Enlarge Photo

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Online databases detail cross-strait languages

The China Post news staff and CNA --The Taipei-based General Association of Chinese Culture launched a website that incorporates a database on cross-strait language use yesterday, the same day a corresponding website and a dictionary of common cross-strait Chinese terms were publicized in Beijing.

The website and the dictionary, compiled and reviewed by experts from Taiwan and mainland China, are the fruits of a proposal by President Ma Ying-jeou in 2008 for a Chinese-language dictionary encompassing terms used on both sides of the strait as a move to further bilateral cultural exchange on the back of improving ties between the two countries.

Traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan. China uses simplified forms of those characters.

Following more than a year of effort, the online database was the first of its kind to adopt cloud computing technology, said the General Association of Chinese Culture, which manages the site.

At the launch ceremony, Ma said the database will serve as a platform for cultural exchanges across the Taiwan Strait and boost mutual understanding, while also helping to preserve the aesthetics of traditional Chinese characters.

“The new initiative is all about culture, without political implications,” Ma said.

“It is impossible to convince the other side to give up (what it is using),” Ma added, saying the best way to approach the issue is to present the differences in the languages spoken by people of the two sides.

The site includes a search engine that allows users to look up words spoken by people from Taiwan and China. In addition to the definition, it will also show the equivalent used by the other side.

Sections introducing the artistic side of Chinese characters and online learning are also among the functions of the website, said Liu Chao-shiuan, chairman of the General Association of Chinese Culture, noting that some 30 million non-Chinese-speaking individuals are learning the language.

The association will launch apps in the future to extend the database service to users of smartphones and tablet computers.

Talks Challenging but Useful: Beijing Expert

At a ceremony in Beijing launching the Chinese dictionary and a website that will share the language database with the Taiwanese site, Li Xingjian (李行健), the editor-in-chief of the dictionary, detailed the negotiations between experts from both sides during the compilation for the dictionary.

While conceding that there are still insolvable differences between cross-strait experts that have to be laid aside for the time being, Li emphasized that both sides have solved a lot of issues through negotiations.

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Comments

February 9, 2012 mb14uk@

繁體 means 'complex', not 'complicated'. There's a difference. Characters aside, though, thank goodness you have finally started using hanyu pinyin Romanization. When I was in Taiwan in the early 1990s, I struggled to learn Chinese not so much because of the characters, but because of the bizarre mix of Wade-Giles and Yale Romanization and the totally pointless 'bo po mo fo' phonetic system. hanyu pinyin is more accurate and easier for foreigners to learn, but the old regime in Taiwan wouldn't accept it for political reasons. My Chinese started developing back home in England and in Beijing, where I learned using pinyin and simplified characters.