What is asthma in Hainanese?
*****
Help, Chen!
We have a Hainanese patient here!
There are many Cantonese and Hokkien nurses around… but Hainanese is a rare species!
I was the only Hainanese nurse, then.
Even then, I struggled with the translation…
…now, ask him if he has asthma before.
Oh, no…
I was stuck!
Asthma?
er.. er… xiao chuan? (Mandarin)
er..er.. che ha? (Cantonese)
er…er.. hei ku ? ( hokkien)
You mean hu hea?
A neighbouring patient offered..
She was listening nearby.
And the patient nodded in agreement!
Even in Chinese alone, there are so many dialects!
I believe many countries
have multilingual communities.
This’s where AI may come in handy
in the absence of professional interpreters
to bridge the linguistic gap
for effective communication
in a multilingual community.
****
To bring relevance to people, you have to be able to speak their language effectively.
– Sunday Adelaja –
Chen Song Ping 
I admittedly am not too familiar with Hainese. Are there a lot of overlap with Hokkien?
I am fluent in Hokkien as it’s what my family speaks. When I lived in the Philippines, I could read, write and speak in Mandarin but sadly lost almost all of it when we moved to Canada because no one to practice with! 😆
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Very far from hokkien. My mum was hokkien, too.
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Good to know. I only know Hainese chicken. Hahaha. One of my favourite meals.
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Thanks for sharing this idea Anita
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Wonderful example of where AI might really help. Even in the US (where most people born here speak some type of English), in Georgia, my cousin got me a job teaching at the same elementary school where she taught. One afternoon, I had to translate my cousin’s New England accent into the words one of the local rural Georgia students could understand.
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Yea, it took me some time to understand my British colleague who pronounced public as pooblic in her lectures, among some other words!
Luckily, there are not many versions of English, unlike Chinese!
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Chen Song Ping, you are exactly right and I appreciate you taking my example for exactly what it was. Some bloggers are so quick to be offended that they would have interpreted thisa a repudiation of what was written.
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