Cantonese/Mandarin differences

[Peter]

I needed to have some text translated from English into Traditional and Simplified Chinese. I have found a translator in China who said he could do the translation in Simplified and also in Traditional Chinese.

The Simplified translation is good, however when I ask my friend from Hong Kong to check the accuracy of the Traditonal translation, she says that she can only recognise a few words,
She speaks Cantonese !

Does anyone have any idea of what the problem may be ?

Thank you very much,
Peter

[Helmut]

It is unlikely that the problem has to do with her speaking Cantonese.

Ideas:
1) traditional translation is really bad, because the translator is not really good at traditional characters
2) the text contains a lot of specific technical terms concerning a subject that your friend is not familiar with
3) are you sure that the simplified translation is good ?

You should go back to your friend and ask more specific what the problem is.

[puiwaihin]

It's possible that you're dealing with a problem with encoding. Try switching the encoding back to simplified characters. It may be that when the person typed it up that it was viewed in traditional but the actual encoding was simplified.

Look at www.mandarintools.com and see the encoding converter. Try running it through from GB to Big5 and see if that doesn't do what you want.

[%sig%]

[Maryka Coetzer]

could you please translate this cantonese to mandarin for me

sab sei lo tan tui