Thursday, February 19, 2004
Posted by Peggy
8:17 AM
WRITE AN SMS IN CHINESE
M1 (www.m1.com.sg), one of the most innovative mobile service providers in Singapore, has an SMS translator service which I like. Sending an SMS in Chinese used to be a headache for people like me who speak the language but are slow in writing Chinese characters.
On a mobile phone, writing in Chinese is even more bothersome. You need to change the language settings on the phone, do the input in hanyu pinyin (Romanized pronunciation), then scroll through a list to select the correct word.
Note that Chinese is a tonal language, and something simple like "ma" can mean different things (e.g., 'horse', 'mother', 'scold', 'sesame seed'... get the picture?) depending on which of the 4 tones it is in.
With this translator service, writing in Chinese will now be a breeze! I can write my message in English and the recipient will get the translated Chinese version.
There are over 30 phone models which support this service. You can preview the message before sending it to double-check the translation. Of course, abbreviations and slang will not be translated. At least not yet.
Chinese Characters FAQ
On-line Mandarin Tools
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