A new transliteration software developed by a group of Cantonese
speakers is winning fans in south China.
Since its launch in May, the program has been downloaded some
12,000 times from its official Website.
"If we assume that people have been sharing the software and
getting it from other Websites, then the total downloads could top
50,000," said Wang Xule, a member of the software development
team.
"Our aim is to let people, especially those whose first dialect
is Cantonese, use the language more efficiently and effectively
while writing on a computer or communicating with each other
online."
The software, "Input Cantonese with ease", allows people to
write more than 30,000 words and 200,000 phrases simply by typing
in the Cantonese pronunciations using the Roman alphabet.
Wang's team has launched two versions so far.
"We are working on the 2.5 version, and it is almost done. We
hope to finish the whole program soon," said the 24-year-old
primary teacher from Dongguan.
Wang said his team had developed the software to "further
facilitate Web friends' future online communications".
"So we will never ask people to pay," he added.
Wang worked closely with 29 programmers from Guangzhou, Foshan
and Hong Kong on the project. The team members volunteered their
time out of a love for the Cantonese language.
"Many Internet users felt that the existing (Cantonese) input
methods were backward, so we decided to invent a new one that was
not only more user-friendly, but also combined the advantages of
the existing input methods," Wang said.
Wang said the software was based on two Cantonese input programs
used extensively in Hong Kong and Guangdong.
"With the one from Hong Kong, people can write the words they
want using 26 letters on the keyboard, but people, especially those
from the Chinese mainland, have found it difficult to use ...
Meanwhile, the one from Guangdong is popular among locals because
the input method is similar to the one use for Mandarin's pinyin.
However, that is not always user-friendly because it requires
people to use some special symbols to get some particular words,"
Wang said.
(China Daily July 24, 2007)