zhengzhu wrote:
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?
Just a question out of curiosity about how you handle this: what's the base language, or is there one? Is the primary version of a document in Simplified, and then there are annotations for how to correctly translate it to Traditional (i.e. [simplified character|proper traditional character]), or is it the other way around, or are both Simplified and Traditional equally base languages?
I'm asking because I was trying to think of a way to do this earlier with two other similar languages, and couldn't think of a good one due to things not being the same in both directions. To take a made-up example, say that Simplified 'a' can be either 'b' or 'c' in Traditional, while Traditional 'b' can be either 'a' or 'd' in Simplified.
Then you could have a "simplified-base" form, that is: [a|b] [a|c] d Or an equivalent "traditional-base" form, that is: [b|a] [c|a] [b|d]
The problem with using only one being that if a traditional user edited the translated "simplified-base" form, there would be no annotation on the 'b', because in the simplified->traditional direction it wasn't needed.
Or does this never happen in Chinese? I realize the example is somewhat confusing, but I couldn't come up with a clear one. The plain-English version of the question is: what do you do when there are one-to-many mappings in both directions? Or are the one-to-many mappings in Chinese only from Simplified to Traditional, and never in the other direction? (Even if so, that would still leave it as an interesting question for other language pairs.)
-Mark