Oh, and ML? The transliterations done by my sister and I are in Mandarin. A practical reason for this is that we are more familiar with Mandarin and that it has the status of a language. Cantonese has the status of a dialect.
So I hope that's okay.
metwin1 suggested that:
However, for the sake of authenticity, you may want to get the character to speak in his local dialect.
Depending on the context, my suggestion is to stick to Mandarin. If you are writing about an actual rescue, and yes, it's a good idea to use a local dialect. But if you are writing about a description of the event by a third party (e.g, Henderson telling the story to Clark), then Mandarin is a better idea, because I assume that Henderson's story source would have come from Chinese newspapers, news, etc. The official media in China uses Mandarin, so all descriptions of "oh great heavenly being", or "dragon king" or "great benefactor", etc, would of course, be in Mandarin.
--meclone2--
