A friend has come to me and my exceptionally limited capacity in Mandarin to offer a translation of the phrase, “The War on Drugs” in Mandarin Pinyin.
Can anyone help?
Declare war: xuan1zhan4
Narcotics/drugs: du2pin3
To ban drugs: jin4du2
To prohibit the cultivation of drugs: jin4zhong4
To oppose/fight drugs: ju4du2
Hope this helps.
Very much!
Xie xie
Just a point of information: Pinyin isn’t a language, Mandarin is. Pinyin is a transliteration system, not translation.
To be extra picky, Mandarin is a dialect of the Chinese language. I am assuming that the original poster knows that pinyin is not a language, and that he was using a language shortcut to specify the form he needed his answer in.
By the way, Morkfromork, “The War on Drugs” is hard to translate because it’s a sentence fragment. If you want to join the war on drugs, that might be different from declaring a war on drugs or joining a war on drugs.
I am aware that Mandarin is the “official” language of China, but that there are hundreds if not thousands of dialects among the various provinces and regions. I also know that Pinyin is a method for expressing Mandarin sounds utilizing roman lettering.
The actual “translation” of the phrase wasn’t particularly important. My friend did a paper on the Opium Wars, one of the main themes being that the war on drugs then is not all that different from the war on drugs now. Of course, it was defended back then in the name of free trade. (Imagine defending the Columbian drug cartels as free traders selling a legitimate product!)
The Pinyin version of “The War on Drugs” was meant to be merely a title for the paper. The professor may or may not actually read or speak Chinese, but I don’t know that it’ll be even relevant. Using ju4du2, I think the intent is probably conveyed.
Thanks again for your quick assistance, NCUN!
No prob. Get me an email address and I’ll send you a jpeg of the characters.
Not necessary. She managed to doctor it up and it has already been submitted. Cheers!
Already done and all, but there would be a standard Chinese phrase for what you were looking for from back then. I don’t know it though, I’m just unwinding after a business trip.
China Guy, I would have left it up to you (my Chinese being of the almost-beginner variety), but he specified “Urgent” so I jumped in.
[hijack]I’ll be traveling to Beijing, Guiyang and GuangZhou within the next month to bring home my second Chinese daughter. I wish we were going near Shanghai–I’d come by and shake your hand.
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