Digital Workshop

We've been asked to reproduce an existing Opus presentation in Mandarin.

Anyone done this / got any tips?

Thanks, Linda

wo cong mei yong gou OPUS

Politely asking again... will Opus handle the Mandarin character set?

Thanks, Linda

Hi Linda

I have no idea whether Opus will handle the Mandarin character set.

In order to find out, I went to the Microsoft website and downloaded a simplified Chinese character set with the intention of installing same. However I chickened out because of the minute but nevertheless, real fear that my system might revert to Chinese and I may never be able to get it back to English without a full reinstall.

I would imagine that you would have to get someone to interpret and convert your English language writing to Chinese characters and that in itself would be rather difficult unless one is fluent in both English and Mandarin.

One idea might be to get them to create screen picture jpgs that you can put into your Opus presentation. This would remove the need for character sets on the viewing computer.

Someone will probably make a post after this one telling you to do this and that and it all works wonderfully well!

If that does not happen, I hope the jpg idea above will enable you to do what you want to do.

Cheers

Graham

Graham,

Thanks for taking an interest... it's a project I've just finished in English - it was very successful, so the client wants it in other languages straight away.

I've just managed to get them to send me a word doc with some Mandarin on it, and using the font MS Hei I "appear" to be correctly changing my Opus text for Mandarin text - so far it's been more successful than I'd thought.

However, after inserting a few characters, I seemed to have font problems - other fonts on different pages started to change (restoring themselves when I closed Opus and opened it again).

I need to publish the test now, and see if there's any embedding problems.

I've worked on video programmes in Chinese, Russian and Arabic before, and had to change the computer's character set to get the video titling programmes to work in the correct languages.

It seems this might be simpler after all - especially as I'm still going left to right.

Thanks again, Linda

Linda

Do your clients want the translation to be done in the traditional Chinese characters, or would they accept the translation in pinyin?

When I worked as a senior staff member at an Australian university which was a pioneer in the use and teaching of Asian languages, including Mandarin, we found that using the pinyin transliteration was readily accepted by native Chinese speakers.

To save you asking, here is a very brief summary of pinyin.

Ray, I'll look into this, thanks very much.

Linda