Thanks to Rowan for a good summary! I think most Chinese speakers
would agree that the difference between Simplified and Traditional
Chinese is a minor one. On the other hand, a pure automatic
translation between the two isn't likely to work, either, no matter
how sophisticated the technique is. This is generally true for any
machine translation, I think.
However, I think the wikipedia project provides a unique platform to
tackle this problem, because there are lots of PEOPLE working together
to provide quality content. The solution has been suggested several
times here before: we use a program to do a simple automatic
translation, using some sort of mapping tables. Since there are only
minor difference between the variants, we can expect that in general
there are not a lot of errors in the translation. We can then add a
special wiki tag in the wikitext to specify how to correct those
errors. Since most (if not all) articles in wikipedia is going to be
edited again and again anyway, by many different people, to add
content, correct errors, etc, why not put in the little bit of extra
effort to correct these translation errors as well?
Thus I have started to implement this idea. I am running a test site
at
http://s87257573.onlinehome.us/wiki, to see how far this can go. It
is not going to be easy to make the initial transition--lots of
editing involved. But who says writing an encyclopedia should be easy?
I welcome all to visit the test site, to try editing a few articles,
and see the results. (There is a short English description there as
well.)
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gmail.com at zhengzhu