RegalStar:
Don't you dare say that Cantonese is a dialect! It's not. It's a language.
China is trying to call Cantonese a dialect due to political reasons.
The definition of a language / dialect is that a language cannot be understood without learning, whilst dialect can be understood without learning.
The difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is actually more than Spanish and Portuguese, or Norwegian and Swedish.
It is by definition a language.
Also, UN lists Cantonese as a LANGUAGE.
Mind you, saying that Cantonese is a dialect is downright OFFENSIVE! Because you are belittling someone's language.
That's naive. Clearly Nintendo sells to China NOW according to the article you linked, and as part of that China has an influence on how those games are sold. For instance, because we sell operating systems to China that has an impact on how they are sold in America, a practice criticized for holding back technological innovation but nevertheless inevitable.
Even if the Chinese government didn't force Nintendo to do this, they might not have understood the implications of requesting a single language copy.
YOU linked an article saying 6000.
Everyone who is commenting and saying thinks like "woah this is dumb", I'd advise you to disregard the carrot on a stick for one moment. Obviously you understand and like Pokemon, but you should contemplate for at least a second that, just maybe, this is a multifacted issue and perhaps language politics isn't less important than who gets to play a video game this year. We're not even talking about a dead language, Cantonese is used by 59 million people. That's over 7 times as many people as live in Quebec, where they'd be rioting if someone didn't sell them Pokemon in French.
The article is wrong. Pokemon Sun Moon is not going to be sold in China.
The article has quite a lot of false information.
BBC is a better source, but at the time I posted the article, BBC hadn't got an article yet.
No no no , that 6000 people who signed the petition were not thinking it's a political issue.
They were people who want to preserve Cantonese names for the first 151 Pokemon.
I signed that petition too.
Honest question: Pokemon Sun and Moon will be translated into both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, associated with both Mandarin and Cantonese. What exactly is stopping Hong Kong players from reading it in Cantonese?
Also, think for a second. Put yourself into Game Freak's shoes. They're working on a Chinese translation for their game, something not done before. No doubt, they have to spend money on it, like any other translation. This is why Pokemon is sold in English in places like Denmark and Sweden - Game Freak does not believe they would make enough money off of translations into Danish and Swedish to justify the expenditures for an official translation. Do you honestly think that they would change the name of one Pokemon just for Cantonese speakers? That would involve a lot of reprogramming - and therefore more money spent, over, I remind you, ONE POKEMON'S NAME. And let's not forget the fact that Mandarin speakers would most likely want to keep this name as it sounds similar to "Pikachu" in Mandarin, so changing the name to accommodate Cantonese speakers would likely alienate Mandarin speakers (which I remind you has more native speakers than any other language in the world). And once again, the games should still be readable if you're a Cantonese speaker.
The whole thing to me seems like a child's tantrum disguised as language politics. Nobody is arguing that the Danish and Swedish languages are being erased by the Pokemon games not being officially translated into these languages, and I bring that up for one simple reason: Those two are entire languages, while the gripe over Pikachu's name in HK is over ONE FUCKING POKEMON'S NAME.
Edit: Also I don't get von's analogy with Quebec, because, once again, you're comparing a Pokemon's name to an entire language.
As I said before, it's not the fans that are getting burtthurt.
The protest is from a POLITICAL action group who are trying to turn this into a political issue, in reality it shouldn't.
But there are some Pokemon fans who are angry simply due to nostalgia reasons.
Although I signed the petition for keeping Cantonese names, I wasn't angry with the name change. Though I think it's important for Nintendo's image.
