(forwarded from the board address by Angela) ---- Forwarded message from "George Herzog" goldy@ms19.hinet.net ----
Date: From: "George Herzog" goldy@ms19.hinet.net To: "'Wikimedia Foundation'" board@wikimedia.org Cc: Reply-To: Subject: [Ticket#: 114424-FW] FW: Traditional Chinese is not [...]
Hi again, Please forgive me for causing such a fuss, but someone needs to be an advocate for Traditional Chinese within your system.
You seem to have taken an 'automated' translation approach that really will likely lead to the eventual elimination of Traditional Chinese users due to it mixing the two texts.
That is the 'best case' scenario. The worst case is that you get a muddled mess of automated hybrid Chinese.
The problem is at the very nature of language and its strong tacit links to culture. Simplified and Traditional Chinese do not have a one-to-one relationship of meanings or characters. In fact the two dictionaries do not have the same number of radicals in their indexes and many characters have been shifted out of their traditional radical index into other locations in the newer dictionary.
That is only the beginning of the problem. Discourse, choice of terminology, idiom, syntax, and schema all have different topologies that are difficult if not impossible to fully document.
Language is not formulaic. Unlike the wrongly-named 'computer language' is does not merely follow a consistent set of abstract rules and it relies highly on shared understand of context and cultural background.
What you need is to have two or more people oversee the Chinese as Mainland China's Simplified is not the same as Hong Kong's Cantonese or Taiwan's Mandarin. A computer can only go so far in translation, then someone must edit and interpret. If you give all the work to the Mainland, the results will be obviously in their favor.
Anyone who tells you that the Chinese language is all in one package is likely to be supporting Mainland China's desire to dominate and unify 'Greater China'.
I strongly suggest that you read the Mainland Chinese constitution as posted at their own government web site. It is quite insightful and self explanatory about their ambitions of unifying the motherland and the Chinese race.
I suspect it will provide you with better assurances than I can.
Respectfully, George Herzog Kaohsiung, Taiwan