Google Translate App for Android

[Doug 周]

This has nothing to do with Chinese genealogy. However, Chinese characters has always been a challenge for me without any Chinese language skills.

At a Chinese restaurant, there is frequently special menus written only in Chinese. These are deals of the day and are very reasonably priced. With the App, you can image the page and immediately the screen will show the English translation. It is enough for you to know what to order. No more entering the characters or waiting for the translation to occur.

This works best if the characters are printed rather than hand written.

Hurrah. Time to eat!

[lachinatown]

doug
Which apps have you tried? What are the good and bad for each one?

[Doug 周]

I use Google Translate. The camera is integrated for Chinese language in my older phone. This does not work for all languages, Thai being one example. Of course printed words work better than hand written words. Let me try to post a screen print next time I am in San Francisco.

[jeremychin]

Pleco is great if you are willing to write out characters to get individual meanings. The ocr is not that good yet. But I agree with you Doug. Google translate is fantastic. Even though it is not the best at reading handwritten characters, it makes a d**n good effort. The new writing feature is not that great yet though. I find that it helps to take a picture of whatever it is and have the app scan it. Then you have it for your records as well. You can go back to it at any time.

[Doug 周]

I agree as Pleco is my goto Chinese genealogy language app.

[susanchocksalgy]

What kind of accuracy should you expect from Google translate when you use it on the phone app to read a page in a book? I just got the zupu for my Zhuo family, and want to be able to read pages in it, but am looking for the best app for the job.

[jeremychin]

Hi Susan,

Google translate is my goto for accuracy at the current moment. But it all depends on how scripted your zupu is. The more scripted it is, the harder it will be for the app to recognize the characters correctly.

- Jeremy

[Doug 周]

Congratulations on obtaining your zupu (Clan Genealogy Book, the Holy Grail of Chinese genealogy). Just for reference let me restate the sections of a zupu as per Sheau-yueh Janey Chao of NYU, probably the authority of Clan Genealogy Books this side of the International Date line.

The Contents of a Zupu:

1. Genealogical Preface
2. Genealogical Principles
3. Family Rules
4. Map of Ancestral Hall
5. Modern map of the clan villages and surrounding main towns associated with clan
6. Maps of residences and properties, with names of lawful owner
7. Photos of contributors, celebrations, and of various villages under the same Clan administration
8. Ancestral portraits
9. Clan’s historical documentation
10. Names of all villages; government administrator's name, originator of each village
11. Family tree diagram, beginning with the progenitor with each generation numbered Shixi biao 世系表, Shixi tu 世系圖
12. Generation order (list of generational names)
13. Biography of family records Jiazhuan 家傳
14. Major events record
15. Records of honors, merits, significant achievements, and events relating to particular individual-biographies
16. Maps of Ancestral Tombs
17. General articles about the market town and surrounding villages
18. List of all related jiapu/zupu
19. Description of earlier clan generation
20. Major development milestones
21. Slogans of each village
22. Ancestral hall or Family Association
23. Dynastic Literary Bibliographies
24. Other Charts and Tables, including clan population distribution statistics

Referenced to Sheau-yueh J. Chao Tracing their roots-genealogical sources for Chinese immigrants to the United States Jan 2008

Here is a more detailed excerpt from her article

Unlike jeremychin I have no Chinese language skills. However, I use both Pleco and Google Translate. Translations of a ‘wall of words’ or a lot of text frequently leaves something to be desired. The family genealogy books (zupu and jiapus) tend to have mainly charts (#11 above) or, if you are lucky, the biographies (#13 above). In my experience, certain other text tend to be in classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a writing style and is different from traditional or simplified fonts. No app nor online site will help you with classical Chinese. IMO, sections 1, 2, 3 tend to be in Classical Chinese, and you will need someone trained in Classical Chinese to read certain sections. Consider commissioning fonny for a translation bid.

Why Classical Chinese Is So d**n Hard from Dr. David Moser (emeritus) University of Michigan 6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).
Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway.

Since section #11 tend to have proper or given names, translations of those sections will not be necessary. Those characters need digitization. Because I cannot read Chinese, I frequently restate the given names in pinyin romanization. Sometimes I will use Jyutping romanization in later generations since people who might follow my charts tend to be Cantonese. I know there are Taishanese and LungDu (my heritage dialect) romanizations but I have trouble working the websites since this is where Google and Baidu translate fails me.

If you have a biographical section #13 in your zupu, here is the URL of a 9 year old post on how I tried to tried to translate the information . My Zhongshan zupu’s seemed to follow a template. I use philiptancl spreadsheet to translate the Chinese dynastic dates to Gregorian dates. The caveat to using Chinese dynastic dates is that at birth (if the child survives) he/she is 1 year of age. Also, since the zupu is an official document and astrology is important, understand that the date of birth and death have symbolic meaning and documenting an unlucky date (even if accurate) would bring bad luck. Here is philiptancl spreadsheet

I hope I explained this well and interpreted your question correctly. If the links to my Google Drive don’t work, please ping me.

~doug

[susanchocksalgy]

Super helpful list, thank you for sharing that. My zupu does have a lot of stories, some with pictures, so I am excited to read those. Louise (my genealogist) is able to read classical Chinese and has sent me English translations of several pages that she felt would be of special interest to us. I would need at least one more lifetime to learn all that I would need to know to do all of this myself. Thankfully there are so many resources such as this forum, to help us.