Gerard Meijssen wrote:
These languagecodes can then have a script associated with them eg cmn-Hans for simplified Chinese. When there are dialects within a language they can be identified as well.
Using zh is imho utterly confusing and associating them with countries does not help at all. More than one language is spoken in Taiwan and therefore zh-hans-tw does not cut it. When you replace traditional with simplified, within one language I can understand what you are doing. However when you in essence start moving across languages and is that not the implication when you talk about things having different terminology are you then not trying to provide translations ?
The written language is much more closely standardised than the spoken language. Speakers of mutually incomprehensible variants of Chinese write in a common script based on Mandarin. Differences in terminology do occur, and in some cases, such as "Cantonese colloquial", characters are introduced to describe words in the local dialect that do not exist in Mandarin. However, these differences are much easier to resolve in software than full translation between languages written phonetically. For conversion to zh-hk, MediaWiki uses a dictionary of 211 entries in addition to the simplified/traditional tables, and for conversion to zh-sg, there is only 15 extra entries.
Is it translation? Or is it just an spelling and terminology change, like conversion from US English to Commonwealth English? Maybe somewhere in between.
-- Tim Starling