LAUSR

There are several predominant variants of both written and spoken Chinese. The written variants are Traditional and Simplified Chinese, and well-known spoken variants include Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwanese Hokkien. Although these variants are related, they do not have perfect mutual intelligibility, and their use is strongly influenced by historical, political, and geographical issues. As a result, understanding the relationship between these written and spoken variants, and the appropriate circumstances for selecting one variant over another, is vital to successful translation and linguistic validation of COAs targeted for use in populations that speak and write modern Chinese.