SENDING MAIL ABROAD
Suppose I live in China and want to send a (snail) mail to the US. Does the name and address on the envelope have to be in Cantonese or English?
What about the other way around. Will the US Postal Service know what to do with a Cantonese scripted envelope?
For what it’s worth–
When my wife was living in Shanghai, letters addressed entirely in English would reach her with no difficulty. Granted, Shanghai is an extremely cosmopolitan place. I doubt an address written in Chinese would have as much success getting to the US. Note: Cantonese is a spoken dialect of Chinese–the various forms of spoken Chinese share a single written language.
For the return trip, to be on the safe side, she’d write the characters for the US, but chances are that wouldn’t have been necessary.
While in Russia, I did the same thing: writing the Cyrillic for USA on top of the English address (since Russian postal addresses go from general to specific, the opposite of American).
Well, when writing out proper names, such as streets, names, and states, it’s usually written in the original langauge. So, if you (or anyone else) were in China, and wanted to send mail to the U.S., you’d write out the address in English.
Even langauges that use the English alphabet, like Spanish, would do the same. Vice versa, if you were in the U.S., and wanted to send mail to Mexico, you wouldn’t translate the address into its English equivalent, would you?
Like, 3467 Calle Blanca wouldn’t be addressed as 3467 White St…
Well, when I was studying Chinese, we had pen-pals in China. We wrote the addresses in both English AND Chinese on the envelope.
When I have sent mail from China to the United States, I have written the entire address in English, and then added “United States”, written with Chinese characters, underneath the English address. That seems to work fine.
I generally write the address with Chinese characters, and then write “China” or “People’s Republic of China” underneath in English. A number of times, I have written the entire address in English, but my experience is that these letters take longer to arrive; even though they generally make it to the local Chinese post office in a timely manner, they sometimes get stuck there if none of the local postal workers can read Roman characters. I once saw an entire stack of such letters at a post office in northern Beijing, some of them months old. (Incidentally, I was in the post office looking for an express mail letter that I knew had been sent to me from the United States a week earlier; and yes, I found my letter in that stack.)
The official policy of the U.S. Postal Service is that all addresses written with Chinese characters must have an “interline translation in English of the names of the post office and country of destination”. Most postal workers do not seem to care whether there is a line-by-line translation as long as the country is written in English.
How about some common sense? You need the people who will deliver the mail to understand the address so it should be written in the language of the destination.
You need the people at the origin to know which country to send it to so you should write that in the language of the originating place.
I have corresponde by mail with China for some years now. Increasingly it is by email but I still regularly use snail mail and, in fact, I just mailed a letter this morning.
I just have the habit of writing it all in both languages. The envelope is plenty big enough to contain both and saving ink is not my concept of economy.
I just prepare the envelope once as a document on my word processor and I can later print as many as I like with no effort.
This is irrelevant to the OP because of 2), but read it anyway. If you want to communicate with most people in China, Mandarin is your best bet. For years, colleges in America taught Cantonese, despite the fact that Manadrin is the most common dialect.
Why? I don’t know, why does the US teach mostly in traditional characters when mainland China’s used the simplified system for most of the century?
Probably because Chinese immigrants tended to speak Cantonese and use traditional forms,(having escaped from the government that made Mandarin and simplified official) and Chinese people actually in China were considered filthy communists we wouldn’t want to talk to anyway.
Nowadays, Mandarin and to a lesser extent simplified Chinese are being taught more widely.
Anyway, as others have pointed out, Mandarin v. Cantonese is irrelevant, because there’s only Chinese characters, not Manadarin or Cantonese. Chinese has many wildly divergent spoken dialects but one written system for all of them. (Although there are, as I mentioned simplified and traditional forms) I would write the address in both languages.
In Chinese, locations and time phrases are grouped from largest to smallest, which is the reverse of the system used here.
The appropriate Chinese way to write the address would be:
People’s Republic of China
Province
City
Street Address
Person
–John
I would like to point out to those involved that there is indeed a difference between mandarin and cantoneese writing. Although it is more a difference in the policies of mainland china and the rest of the chinese world. A few decades back, China created a whole new writing system to “simplify” the characters. In mainland china they use the simplified system, but in Hong Kong and Taiwan they use the old complicated system. Of course, most people in China can read the old system, but it seemed to be dying out when I lived there (six years ago). Not once did I see a sign or store front with the complicated characters… all simplified… People in Hong Kong and Taiwan might be able to read the simplified characters, but they are still two very different writing systems.
As for the problem of what to write… I always just used english. I know at the university I was living in, they would take all english letters they recieved and ask the first white person to come in who they belonged to. It sometimes took a while to get the mail, but it always got there.
-nigel
Nigel, the traditional and simplified forms have nothing to do with Cantonese and Mandarin. Simplified characters are the equivalent of spelling reform; Cantonese and Mandarin are different dialects.
–John
>> I always just used english. I know at the university I was living in, they would take all english letters they recieved and ask the first white person to come in who they belonged to. It sometimes took a while to get the mail, but it always got there.
Well, If you sent me a letter to Washington DC written with Chinese characters I would probably get it after some delay but doesn’t this strike you as a pretty stupid thing to do? Why make things difficult when you can make them easy?
And, as Yue Han points out, simplified characters are just … simplified characters! Where they used one with more strokes now they use a simpler one.
If you write to China from the US:
If you write to the US from China:
What’s all the fuss about? When writing abroad, all you need to make sure is everyone along the way of your mail knows what they have to do with it. The mail carrier in the states just tosses your mail in the China box and it goes there. The guy at China picks it up and reads the province name in Mandarin and your mail goes to that province. The next guy there reads the city name and so on and so on. It all works out just fine…