Stirling, I have a minor question here,
With this "conversion", do you mean conversion of terms between different dialects of Cantonese? Or do you mean conversion between Cantonese and Mandarin? The former is certainly technically possible and definitely a good idea (although a written standard based on the speech of a large population center might be a simpler idea), but the later is not going to work in the forseeable future because in addition to terminology, there are also differences of grammar in Cantonese and Mandarin, which in some cases includes word-order.
I think it's very important to make this distinction in this discussion because it is potentially very confusing to the uninitiated.
Mark
On Sat, 25 Dec 2004 11:14:49 -0500, Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net wrote:
On Dec 25, 2004, at 11:01 AM, John Lee wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
It's a trade off between reader confusiong, from dialectical inconsistencies, and editor confusion. Of these two, the latter is easier to solve, because educating editors is within the reach of Wikimedia, where as changing readers is not. This syntax is no more difficult than the use of macros, image links and considerably less complex than tables.
The problem is that in English it will be greatly confusing and irritatingly convoluted. Even simple words will have to be written using the syntax (i.e. centre or center? Billion or millard? Flavour or flavor?). Imagine editing an article with this sort of thing. I don't think the trade-off is worth it, at least for different English "dialects".
Less work than editting mathematical equations or tables by far. And less work that reorganizing and moving pages.
As for othographic dialect changes this is not an objection: there is already a tradition:simplified substitution that does a similar level of translation. The process would be to have a "reverse bot" which would find where users have made orthological dialect differences, substitute them for the base dialect word, and then put them in machine translation.
It's not conceptually difficult, whether it is what people want to do is another, but it is certain "worth it" for readability and consistency.
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