Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 May 10

= May 10 =

Commonwealth Essay Competition
I am looking for information about the Commonwealth Essay Competition because I wish to enter the next one. I am from Singapore. Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.156.8.254 (talk) 08:29, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Your local British Council should be able to help with information on the 2010 competition.  --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 09:36, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Chinese text request
For personal research I require Chorley in Chinese, both symbolic and if possible in Roman script. Cheers doktorb wordsdeeds 16:17, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Transliterating non-Chinese words into Chinese characters is not an exact science at all; if there's not an accepted conventional exonym, then probably different people could do it in different ways. The article Harry_Potter_in_translation used to be accompanied by numerous lists of all the Chinese transliterated/translated versions of Harry Potter names and special words, including explanations as to why the Taiwanese and mainland translators sometimes did things differently (but I guess all that got deleted as "cruft")... AnonMoos (talk) 22:44, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * The standard transliteration seems to be 乔利 (Qiaoli), but also seen as 乔莱 (Qiaolai). --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 23:13, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Heh, the name means peasants' clearing (according to the article), which ought to be easy to put into Chinese! —Tamfang (talk) 23:15, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you all for the replies. It is interesting to consider how the transliterating process can be less than accurate. doktorb wordsdeeds 16:59, 11 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Whenever you convert from one phonology to another you tend to lose information, because no language (and thus no language's writing system) makes all the possible contrasts among speech sounds. What features are preserved by a given scheme is inevitably somewhat arbitrary. —Tamfang (talk) 01:22, 13 May 2009 (UTC)