"In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net", a translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the W...

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

"In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net", a translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

via https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114605076806447333

#internet #TheWeb #WorldWideWeb #chinese #language #linguistics

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

Reminds me of the localization efforts on Mozilla's Firefox OS several years ago.

"Ibrahima Sarr, a Senegalese coder, led the translation of Firefox into Fulah, which is spoken by 20m people from Senegal to Nigeria. “Crash” became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying); “timeout” became a honaama (your fish has got away). “Aspect ratio” became jeendondiral, a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven."

https://archive.is/2025.01.09-014218/https://www.economist.com/international/2014/09/27/cookies-caches-and-cows

#technology #language #linguistics #translation #localization

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

stefan@stefanbohacek.online Chinese is clever in many ways!

The Cantonese word for ketchup both sounds like ketchup, and literally translated means “tomato sauce”.