Kaixo! Li Wed, 30 Jun 2004 13:36:22 +0800, YiDa Chiang ccpz@sparc20.hchs.hc.edu.tw scrijheut:
YC> hello,I'm now translating wiki into Traditional Chinese YC> but chinese language code "zh" is used for Simplified Chinese YC> so can I use "zhtw" for Traditional Chinese translation? or else?
ISO 639 codes are only about languages, not about writting conventions. Traditional and simplified chinese aren't distinguished; it is the same for languages like Uzbek or Serbian that can be written in cyrillic or latin. "zh" is not "simplified Chinese", it is simply "Chinese", without any more information.
An usual way to disambiguate traditional chinese and simplified chinese is to use the language code with the country code of the biggest one where each sort of writting is used, eg: "CN" and "TW"; that gives "zh-CN" for simplified and "zh-TW" for traditional. That is used a lot in multilingual web sites that have traditional and simplified chinese pages.