On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 15:10:10 -0400, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
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?
This is a problem in general, but I think a minor one for the case of Simplified/Traditional Chinese. In short, there is no "base" language, the wikitext can in fact be mixed, using both Simplified and Traditional characters. Here is the long explanation:
Out of about 5000 to 6000 commonly used Chinese characters, about half of them (~2600) have different Simplified/Traditional forms. However the difference is very regular; there are pretty clear rules on how one maps to another. You can think of this in English as, for example, always change Simplified character begining with "sh" to "ch" to get the Traditional form (i.e. ship -> chip, sheep->cheep, etc.) There are a few exceptions, but most of the time these rules work. As a result, there would be little difficulty for a Chinese editor to recognize both Simplified and Traditional characters, regardless of his or her native language. Plus, the editor must have read the (automatically) translated article first, which should contain far less unfamilar characters. I imagine it would be no more difficult to locate the place one wants to correct than say, to make changes to a table.