[KnowItAll]

的士 <-- is this correct?

When I put this into a translator, the translation that comes back is "Gentlemen" ... interestingly enough, the more common usage for this is 的士 減價 which means something like Gentleman's Discount / price reduction (term used for discounted taxi fares).

How does the word gentleman equate to taxis?

[freeier]

some bugs ?
anyway de-shi 的士is a phonic translation of taxi.
i think the formal term shld be ji-cheng-che..
which i have no idea how to type into mandarin. 8-P will leave that to others.

[ayukobaby]

ji-cheng-che is 計程車 (mandarin)
taxi is 的士 (cantonese)

KIA, the translation site ur using is funny. but well, maybe gentlemen are loads on the street like those taxi haha all waiting for classy women to get on. i can see how this equation works

[KnowItAll]

Using this .... http://www.worldlingo.com/en/product...ranslator.html

Weird how some things get translated.

[freeier]

i think it was interpreted as 'shen shi'.
gentlemen.

[ayukobaby]

ここで他のげんごも使えますか。

so this site can show chinese, im just wondering if it shows japanese too. thats cool if it does.

lets see.

[jayinhongkong]

There's no translator that adequately translates Hong Kong-style Cantonese into English unfortunately. The best tool I've found is Cantodict (<snip>) but it's missing a lot of local expressions. There are a lot of things HK Chinese people say that people in Guandong don't understand.

[KnowItAll]

Jay .. bad url.

[HK_Newbie100]

Cantonese -> English translation as pointed out is very hit and miss, because you don't know what's colloquial and what's not. Not to be trusted.

Google translate is pretty good nevertheless. At least 的士comes back as taxi, as well as 計程車

There's also this book I once saw in the Commercial Press Bookshop (many eons ago) that showed all the differences between Cantonese and Mandarin, literally listing thousands of words and expressions that differ, although some expressions seemed dated and rarely heard in HK.

[neither3nor4]

士 by itself can mean gentleman. Originally it meant a court official. The 的 in 的士 (here a phonetic transcription) is a grammatical particle used for possesive case and marking adjectives. The translation software would have ignored it as there was no preceding noun phrase.

士 is used as an 's' in transcription. For example;
巴士 bus, 貼士 tip, 多士 toast, 芝士 cheese, 士多 store, 士多啤梨 strawberry


@HK_Newbie100: You must mean Colloquial Cantonese and Putonghua Equivalents by Zeng Zifan trans. S.K. Lai

By the way, 的士 is written on the side and lights of HK taxis, so it is fair to say it is the most appropriate term here.