For most Westerners, the concept of a language with hundreds of different dialects and multiple written systems is a completely alien one. There are, in fact, so many different Chinese dialects, corresponding to areas throughout the various Chinese-speaking regions, that to cover them all would be a truly exhaustive task.

Some are, in fact, so distinctly different as to be considered separate Chinese languages altogether. This would be the case, for example, when comparing Mandarin to Cantonese - each being a distinctly different Chinese language. Ji-Lu, on the other hand, is an example of a language that is sufficiently similar to Mandarin as to be considered a dialect instead of a true language.

Oftentimes, however, the distinction between dialect and language is quite vague and open to debate. Nevertheless, regardless of dialect, there are only two systems for writing Chinese, and it’s obviously the written forms of the language that are most relevant when discussing Chinese translation.

The first and older of the two written systems - typically referred to as either “Traditional” or “Complex” Chinese - has been in use for hundreds of years and is still in use today in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and among the majority of Chinese immigrants scattered throughout the world.

The newer system - Simplified Chinese - is, as its name indicates, a simplified version of the traditional character set, with thousands of the most commonly-used characters having undergone a simplification process throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, in which the number of strokes used to write those characters was greatly reduced. Today, Simplified Chinese is used only in the People’s Republic of China and Singapore.

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Here at ALTA, we don’t get very many inquiries for translation services or language testing in Quechua. That’s not to say that the language of the Incas, which today is spoken by over 5 million Peruvians, Bolivians, and Ecuadorians, is not important. While Quechua may not be a top language of commerce, it is certainly an interesting, important, and resilient tongue. And since, on this blistering Bloomsday, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic for my more literary days, I thought I’d share the news that esteemed Peruvian scholar, Demetrio Tupac Yupanqui, has published the first Quechua translation of Cervante’s Don Quixote.

Yupanqui’s translation of the seminal work of Spanish literature is the most recent attempt by proponents of Quechua to increase the social and political cache of Latin America’s most widely spoken indiginous language. A great way to broaden any language’s sphere of influence is to introduce great works of literature in translation, and thereby help to involve speakers in a broader cultural conversation.

There are other indicators that Quechua may be making a comeback after centuries of decline. As reported in the NY Times article, both Microsoft and Google have recently made their services available in Quechua translations, and laws have been passed in Peru that prohibit discrimination based on language.

While I don’t speak Quechua, I’ll take Yupanqui’s word for it when he says, “If Latin is said to be the language of the angels, then Quechua is the language for expressing the subtleties of existence on Earth. That is why it is still alive.”

Back in the ’90s, the magazine Language Today published an article by George Weber that analyzed the world’s most influential languages. It was an interesting analysis, because it accounted for “influence” of a language in a number of ways.

For example, Chinese has the most speakers in the world, but it ranks 6 on the list. The formula also takes into account the number of secondary speakers of a language (of which Chinese, a relatively complex language, has few), as well as other factors, such as the economic power of countries that use the language.

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You may have had an experience where you took a test for a class, and the instructor showed you the class’s results afterwards. The results probably mapped out into the infamous “bell-shaped curve”, with a few people scoring on the low end of the curve, the majority clustering in the middle, and a few people scoring on the high end. What you may not have known is that this is a normal distribution found in norm-referenced testing.

Norm-referenced tests (or NRTs) compare an examinee’s performance to that of other examinees. Standardized examinations such as the SAT are norm-referenced tests. The goal is to rank the set of examinees so that decisions about their opportunity for success (e.g. college entrance) can be made.

Criterion-referenced tests (or CRTs) differ in that each examinee’s performance is compared to a pre-defined set of criteria or a standard. The goal with these tests is to determine whether or not the candidate has the demonstrated mastery of a certain skill or set of skills. These results are usually “pass” or “fail” and are used in making decisions about job entry, certification, or licensure. A national board medical exam is an example of a CRT. Either the examinee has the skills to practice the profession, in which case he or she is licensed, or does not.

ALTA’s exams, which measure the candidate’s performance against pre-defined criteria (the performance levels), are also an example of criterion-referenced tests. Based on the passing level set by ALTA or the client, the results can then be used to determine whether or not the candidate meets the performance requirements of the job from a language standpoint.