Stirling, I have a minor question here,
With this "conversion", do you mean conversion of terms between
different dialects of Cantonese? Or do you mean conversion between
Cantonese and Mandarin? The former is certainly technically possible
and definitely a good idea (although a written standard based on the
speech of a large population center might be a simpler idea), but the
later is not going to work in the forseeable future because in
addition to terminology, there are also differences of grammar in
Cantonese and Mandarin, which in some cases includes word-order.
I think it's very important to make this distinction in this
discussion because it is potentially very confusing to the
uninitiated.
Mark
On Sat, 25 Dec 2004 11:14:49 -0500, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry(a)xigenics.net> wrote:
On Dec 25, 2004, at 11:01 AM, John Lee wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
It's a trade off between reader confusiong,
from dialectical
inconsistencies, and editor confusion. Of these two, the latter is
easier to solve, because educating editors is within the reach of
Wikimedia, where as changing readers is not. This syntax is no more
difficult than the use of macros, image links and considerably less
complex than tables.
The problem is that in English it will be greatly confusing and
irritatingly convoluted. Even simple words will have to be written
using the syntax (i.e. centre or center? Billion or millard? Flavour
or flavor?). Imagine editing an article with this sort of thing. I
don't think the trade-off is worth it, at least for different English
"dialects".
Less work than editting mathematical equations or tables by far. And
less work that reorganizing and moving pages.
As for othographic dialect changes this is not an objection: there is
already a tradition:simplified substitution that does a similar level
of translation. The process would be to have a "reverse bot" which
would find where users have made orthological dialect differences,
substitute them for the base dialect word, and then put them in machine
translation.
It's not conceptually difficult, whether it is what people want to do
is another, but it is certain "worth it" for readability and
consistency.
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