Delirium provides a good reference - yes, something we can agree on! :)
However, I'd take issue with the convertor being considered
"impossible by many experts." If a human being, with expert
knowledge, can map it across, certainly it is not in the domain of
"impossible" tasks.
In fact, ZH Wikipedia could be a leader in the development of such a
system, and create a modular open source solution for others to use
too. The "power of many" can certainly be seen in this task, which has
a variety of special cases for mapping based on context. The mapping
system itself could be run like a wiki, so people can contribute and
alter the rules as needed, as colloquial grammar and usage changes
with time.
The challenge now is getting enough critical mass and developers for ZH.
-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 10:50:04 -0500, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
>
> >I don't want to get into the debate, but just FYI, such a convertor is
> >considered impossible by many experts. By impossible, I mean
> >impossible in the level of a perfect German to English to German
> >machine translation software. Refer to Unicode mailing list and its
> >archives for more details.
> >
> >
> Just to provide some more concrete points of reference:
>
> Jack Halpern and Jouni Kerman. "The Pitfalls and Complexities of Chinese
> to Chinese Conversion". Proceedings of the 14th International Unicode
> Conference, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, March 1999.
> [http://www.basistech.com/papers/chinese/c2c.html]
>
> The biggest issue seems to be that certain simplified characters map to
> one of multiple traditional characters, depending on context. Thus a
> translator has to know the context, which requires solution of some
> fairly daunting natural-language processing problems. Conversion from
> traditional to simplified seems to be much easier, as it typically
> collapses the total number of characters used.
>
> -Mark
>
>
>
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