On Thu, 16 Sep 2004 09:08:50 -0400, zhengzhu zhengzhu@gmail.com wrote:
As someone pointed out before, the problem is not just on the character-to-character mapping. Some concepts are expressed entirely differently, for example, 电脑(electronic brain) vs. 计算机(calculator or computer). A second example will be translations of foreign names, for example, Croatia is translated in Mainland China as 克罗地亚,but 克罗埃西亚in Taiwan. This kind of difference can be arbitrary, and will likely evolve along time. It is mainly this kind of difference that requires a special markup.
This does seem to be a different issue: there are bound to be multiple variations in the language over and above the character conversion, but these are *cultural*, and there's no guarantee [or I doubt there is] that there won't be people that write in Traditional, but use the vocabulary/whatever normally associated with Simplified. You can also be pretty sure that there are plenty of cases where there are more than two ways of saying something; or more than one way within mainland China, say (it's a big place, is it not?). As I said before, this is true of en:, but given that we can all basically understand each other, most people seem to consider trying to find a technical solution a waste of time.
If: a) there are genuinely *exactly two* dialects of Chinese [written] vocabulary, and users of each of these map *exactly* to users of each of the character systems or: b) we want to create a system that can store any number of related languages/dialects in one database: e.g. all the Scandinavian languages [and are prepared to support *more than two* versions of Chinese] then: we need to worry about differences in vocabulary/usage else: we can use Mark's simplified system as a special case for converting between Traditional and Simplified Chinese.
I could of course be entirely wrong, but that's how I read the situation.