ABSTRACT
Chinese, in particular Mandarin Chinese, is currently the most spoken language in the world, with an estimated 1.2 billion primary and secondary speakers, while English ranks a distant second with 330 million native speakers, and a further 150million secondary speakers. Among various Chinese languages, Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/Guoyu/Huayu) is the only official written form and is the only common official language in the four Chinese-speaking countries and regions, including the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (commonly known as “Taiwan”), Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore. Standard Mandarin is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations. (There are dialects within the Mandarin language family, spoken in various regions in the north and southwest of China.) Incidentally, Standard Mandarin Chinese, together with the other five official UN languages, are also ranked as the six most influential languages in the world, when judged by the total number of world speakers, the geographical influence, the economic power of countries speaking the language, and the literary and scientific use of the language. China has the fastest growing economy in the world, and is the second largest economy, after the United States, in terms of purchasing power parity GDP. Perhaps most pertinent to the topic in this chapter, China (including Hong Kong) was the biggest exporter in 2008 and is poised to become the world’s biggest importer in 2010. The largest trading partners with China are (1) the European Union, (2) the United States, (3) Japan, and (4) the Association of South East Asian Nations. Consequently, for various economic, political, cultural, and humanitarian reasons,
machine translation (MT) of Chinese from and into other languages is an increasingly more important application in the natural language processing (NLP) area.
