Chinese Mandarin - The "Pu-Tong-Hua"

Mandarin is the official spoken language in Mainland China, Taiwan Region & Singapore. Simplified Chinese is the written text used in mainland PRC & Singapore & Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong & overseas Chinese communities. 

Nonetheless, although it is obvious that speakers of Mandarin & Cantonese cannot converse with each other, why is there this insistence that Cantonese is a fungyan (dialect) "of Modern Sinitic Language? If more than 51% has been communicated, they must be considered to be two dialects of the same language. The 51% figure is actually overly generous. To my mind, there are but two reasons: 2. the influence of Stalin's discussions on "language" & "dialect"; 2. the imperceptible psychological pressure of "politicolinguistics".

With Hong Kong's return to PRC in 1997 & with the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, Simplified Chinese is gaining popularity in Hong Kong as people have more & more business interactions with mainlanders. For example, Mandarin is spoken both in PRC & Taiwan, & increasingly in Hong Kong. A lot of people in the US Chinese community also speak Mandarin. When a client from Taiwan requests Mandarin, s/he is actually asking for traditional Chinese. Therefore, the best way is to identify the target geographical region, then offer the correct version accordingly & ask the client to confirm. This way, they will never end up with a wrong version. Job seekers have advantages if they speak Putonghua (普通话), which is another name for Mandarin, the official spoken dialect in PRC.

Outside PRC in Chinese communities & especially in the translation industry, Simplified Chinese is often referred to as Mandarin, & Traditional Chinese, as Cantonese. Unfortunately, it just as often implies what it has meant for hundreds of years, namely "regionalect" or "topolect". Or it may be a confused jumble of the old & the new. Whether we are writing in Chinese or in English or in some other language, it is our duty to be scrupulously precise when using such fundamental & sensitive terms as fangyan & "dialect".

Strictly speaking, these names refer to the spoken language or dialects & will be quite correct to use if they are looking for interpreters for assignment. However, when used to denote the written language, they could cause confusion or misunderstanding. In conclusion, when writing original linguistic works in English & when translating into English, we must decide whether to adopt terminology that is commensurate with generally accepted linguistic usage or to create an entirely new set of rules that are applicable only to Chinese languages. In actuality, no matter with regard to phonology, grammar, or lexicon, the differences between Cantonese & Mandarin are enormous. Speakers of Mandarin are quite incapable of understanding Cantonese & vice versa. This is a fact of which everyone is fully aware. 

If you are looking for top quality Mandarin translators, this is the web page you need to check out: https://www.actranslation.com/mandarin/mandarin-translator.htm. 

Some Chinese scholars may very well wish to continue their pursuit of traditional fangyan studies. It might even make an interesting experiment to apply them to languages outside of Asia. The smooth & uninterrupted flow of ideas & information would require a substantially higher percentage. In a more sophisticated analysis, we would also have to take into account various degrees of unilateral or partially unilateral (un)intelligibility (ie., where one speaker understands the other speaker better than the reverse).

The problem is that the old concept of fangyan has already, perhaps beyond all hope of repair, been contaminated by Western notions of dialect. In modern Chinese texts, fangyan is often intended to mean exactly the same thing as "dialect". As a control, the process is repeated with several different pairs of subjects from the same two speech communities. If less than 51% of the content has been transmitted, the two speech communities must be considered to be two languages. 

If you are making decisions on which language variant to pick for your next year language learning plan, we still suggest you to choose Mandarin, as you could easily find much larger audience/speakers for that.