Chinese postal addresses

Since you have managed to include the Chinese here <Respect!> I can see no reason not to include it on the return label.

Do they recognise strings of question marks?

The question marks show as Chinese ideograms in my news reader (Thunderbird).

Another Dave

Another Dave wrote on 02/07/2021 :

Mine too - Mesnews

I'd be inclined to add spaces around the numbers and provide both languages since you can do it. The ASCII text is a phonetic transliteration of the Chinese characters. You want CHINA in the English version of the address too so that it can actually get out of the UK.

It will help the postman at the other end a lot if it is in Chinese.

I'll see if Agent has a update.

Mine too, but copying and pasting those into Google Translate gives: Putian Street Jihua Road 571 good class day Dasha 703 Shenzhen Guangdong Province

Compare that to the OP's original English: Address: bantianjiedaojihualu571haobantiandasha703 City: shen zhen shi Province: guang dong sheng Zip code: 518100

I wonder if the website has a "contact" address in the original Chinese?

I'd already tried that before posting here, for me copying and pasting it back and forwards between english and chinese and back again stays the same, except that the "shi" which I think is for "city" sometimes ends up as "stone", other times it goes missing altogether

Unfortunately not.

Try installing a chinese character font....

And in Pan.

what three words?

In English that should be:

Haoban Tian Dasha 703, Jihua Road 571, Bantian Street, Shen Zhen City, Guang Dong Province (Zip 518100)

which will probably be understood by Chinese Postie.

Owain

The royalmail print-your-own-label thing doesn't allow UTF-8 characters, so I put the romanised version in there and an extra sticky label with the chinese version

I don't know; I asked a Chinese-reading friend to put it into a proper format for me.

Owain

Although I don't read Chinese I've actually been to Shenzhen (one word AFAIK in English, although it's 2 characters).

That doesn't look an odd address construction for that part of the world.

But I wouldn't count on the Chinese postie. A lot of the people I worked with had no English, which made communication a bit interesting.

Andy

Be very wary of that. They may not *speak* English but they can quite often understand it much better than naive businessmen might realise!

It might also depend on whether they use the same weird system as in Japan where buildings on a long road are numbered in the order that they were built and not like in the UK odd on one side even on the other and gradually increasing from one end. The fax was basically invented in Japan so that you could send people a "How to find us sketch map"!

Maps were actually illegal in Japan for much of their history.

One of the more useful phrases I was taught was "kono hen de ee desu" which literally translates as "this place will do fine" which you say to a taxi driver who is quite obviously completely lost. Pay up, get out and then hail another local cab who might actually know where he is!

I'd expect most Chinese or Japanese people to be able to read Romaji characters not least because that is the most common way of entering Chinese/Japanese text into a computer. You type in the phonetic sound on a standard ASCII keyboard and it offers you the characters matching it.

Learning the 26 characters of our alphabet is trivial in comparison to a language where basic literacy requires knowing how to draw something like 2000 characters. That is how you look them up - by stroke count to draw them in a dictionary starting from certain basic forms...

Maybe not every Chinese postie, but the supervisor or someone will probably be able to work it out.

Owain