Thomas Tsoi
Preface to the Cantonese Edition
Cantonese (廣東話) is also known as Yue (粵語), Guangfu speech (廣府話) or Guangzhou speech (廣州話). In academic circles “Yue” is the most common term; this book uses “Cantonese”, the name more familiar to the general public.
Cantonese is one of the languages of the Sinitic family, spoken mainly in Guangdong province in China, hence its name. Two points need to be made, however. First, not all of Guangdong speaks Cantonese as a mother tongue: in the north-east Hakka is mainly spoken, and in eastern Guangdong Southern Min. Second, Cantonese is also spoken outside Guangdong, for example in Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia and some other overseas Chinese communities. According to statistics, there are at least 62 million native speakers of Cantonese worldwide, placing it among the 30 languages with the most native speakers in the world.
The publication of The Little Prince in Cantonese hopes, on the one hand, to bring Cantonese-speaking friends a more intimate way of getting to know and appreciating the life lessons in the book; on the other hand, it hopes to use this much-loved classic to introduce our language to friends who are interested in Cantonese, including speakers of Chinese languages other than Cantonese. For this reason, this preface and the editorial notes are written in standard Chinese. In addition, Notes for Collectors has been prepared for friends who speak non-Chinese languages, so that they can learn about this interesting language.
I want to thank Zoe for her contribution to this Cantonese translation. When she travelled she brought me back many editions of The Little Prince in different languages, and she hopes that, now that she has a Little Prince of her own, she can trade it for even more rare editions. I also want to thank Suki, who has a deep knowledge of Cantonese and other Chinese languages and gave me many valuable suggestions. In addition, Prof. Yip Ka and Prof. Wong Kim-fan each gave me a great deal of advice on translation details, from which I benefited greatly. Finally, of course, the two illustrators, Aria and KH: without their brilliant interpretation the book would have been much duller. And Cheryl, who hand-lettered the book. She is long accustomed to formal calligraphy, and asking her to stoop to writing cute lettering this time, fortunately she did not refuse, otherwise I really could not have found anyone better. Once again, a heartfelt thank-you to each of you.
From the start of the project to actual publication, this Cantonese Little Prince took six years, and for those six years I could not let go of it and wanted to see my wish through. Now that the wish has finally come true, I can say to this Little Prince, in Cantonese: “You are different from all the other Little Princes, because the time I have spent on you has made you unique!” (你同所有其他嘅《小王子》都唔同，因為我花喺你身上嘅時間，已經令你變得獨一無二！)
Preface to the Hong Kong Jyutping Edition
The idea of producing a version of The Little Prince with the whole text annotated in Jyutping existed even before the Cantonese edition came out in 2017. At that time we felt that one group of target readers for this book would be learners whose mother tongue is not Cantonese but who are learning it. They fall mainly into two groups: the descendants of Cantonese-speaking Chinese who have settled overseas (the so-called “jook-sing” boys and girls, 竹昇仔、竹昇妹), and foreigners who want to learn Cantonese language and culture. Either way, a reader annotated with Jyutping should be a very useful learning resource. For readers who already speak Cantonese, the book can serve as a way to learn Jyutping, and also as a stepping stone towards popularising written Cantonese. After all, many Cantonese words have no standard written form, so only by marking the pronunciation as well can translator and reader be sure to communicate accurately through language.
But in 2017 we did not produce a Jyutping edition in the end, mainly because the project sounded rather daunting and I hadn’t yet made up my mind. It wasn’t until this year that I finally summoned the courage to finish it. But understanding the principle that “one bamboo stalk bends and breaks easily, but a bundle of bamboos is hard to snap” (一枝竹仔會易折彎，幾枝竹一扎段折難), I decided to see whether any friends could help, and Chaak, who runs Words.hk, readily agreed straight away.
From the start we planned to have the computer add Jyutping to the text automatically, and then proofread by hand to correct mismatched readings. Indeed, this saves a lot of time, and the accuracy is fairly good.
After Chaak and his other Words.hk friends had corrected readings using phonetic methods, we still did two more rounds of character-by-character manual proofreading. This part took quite some time, so I must especially thank Zoe Lam and Vanessa Tsang Wing-yan for their help. One is my senior (I hardly ever call her that, because she’s not that much older than me), who studied in the predecessor of CUHK’s Department of Linguistics, known as “Mo Lik Kau” (磨𡃁溝, Modern Languages and Cultures); the other is my junior from CUHK Linguistics. Several generations of CU Ling people got together to do something for their mother tongue, which I think is quite meaningful.
After proofreading the Jyutping, the remaining problem was typesetting. For some reason there is very little information online about typesetting phonetic annotation. I first thought I could write the text and Jyutping in HTML and import it into InDesign, but that turned out to be a dead end. In the end, after studying the InDesign file format for a while, I wrote a program to convert the Jyutping format exported by Chaak into the specific format InDesign needs, and finally managed to import the whole text. A little regretfully, this process was rather technical and not very convenient; I hope software support in this area will improve in future.
Finally, some friends asked why this book isn’t simply called the Cantonese Edition again. It’s because we wanted to stress that this is the version with Jyutping, so that readers can find it more easily. And because “Cantonese Edition with Jyutping” was too cumbersome, we finally decided on “Hong Kong Jyutping Edition”. And since this book is called the Hong Kong Jyutping Edition, the other Cantonese translated literary work we are releasing at the same time was named Animal Farm – Hong Kong Written Cantonese Edition, for consistency.