Mark Williamson wrote:
Tim, please see yue: and proposed (and "approved") wuu:
The "words" that don't exist in Mandarin aren't just words -- there are grammatical differences as well.
I'm aware of this. This thread is about enabling the language converter on commons, and thus allowing automatic conversion between the various formal written forms of Mandarin, not about the comprehensibility of these written forms to children, nor about the phonetic orthographies. I mentioned colloquial Cantonese merely as an aside.
As far as I know, the language converter does not deal with colloquial characters. If a colloquial translation is to be given, it would have to be created manually.
Of course, this has no bearing on whether or not the converter should be enabled on Commons. The only issue there is adapting the code, which won't work on Commons without some modification. I don't think there's any question that having a converter available would be useful, there's just some technical details to be dealt with, some of which have been discussed in this thread.
-- Tim Starling