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