Linguistic permutation
It might be hard to find a person, who cannot count, I think. Let’s try your own ability to count, ok? For this let’s imagine you’re a professional translator and would like to list all the possible translation directions, ‘from’ and ‘into’, for the languages you know. And, imagine you know not too little: Chinese, English and Russian.
Most of the people would like to think this way:
from English into Chinese
from English into Russian
from Chinese into English
from Chinese into Russian
from Russian into English
from Russian into Chinese
We’ve got six pairs!
But this is not the fact, indeed; the modern Chinese language is really something, especially if you, say, travel from Mainland China to Hong Kong or Taiwan. In this case almost everything you know in Mandarin Chinese, its written form, gets
useless. Why?
Because on the both side of the Taiwan Straight they write, and
partially speak, not the same Chinese language; and that’s why we
have to revise the above list like following:
from English into Traditional Chinese
from English into Simplified Chinese
from English into Russian
from Traditional Chinese into English
from Simplified Chinese into English
from Traditional Chinese into Russian
from Simplified Chinese into Russian
from Russian into English
from Russian into Traditional Chinese
from Russian into Simplified Chinese
So, they are ten! That’s correct, when it comes to written translation the things become more complicated, a bit; and this is an actual state of things with aslang.com’s options for translating.
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