On 22/09/05, Milos Rancic millosh@mutualaid.org wrote:
I am sure that it is possible to make a software for conversion between British and American English, such Zhengzhu did for Chinese. All people would work on one Wikipedia and all people would use their own variant.
This is something that was indeed discussed when that software was being developed. Apart from how to deal easily with exceptions, there are problems with differences in meaning of the same word - to pull an example out of the air, if a British user types "pants", it should be converted to "underpants" when viewed by a US one; but if it was typed by the US one, it should appear as "trousers" when viewed by the Brit. I'm not 100% sure the Chinese orthography issue has these kinds of double-mappings, but I can't remember. And what of words with two meanings, such as "fall" for "autumn" - you wouldn't want text coming out as "large trees sometimes autumn over"...
Plus, as I was recalling elsewhere, another problem is that there are many more than two varieties of English, so if you gave every user a choice of US or British, an Australian wouldn't know which to choose. And if you created a version for every variety, you would have to create and maintain lookup tables for converting between all those different versions.
In the end, you'd be writing an entire machine translation system, which isn't something generally considered all that easy. As I've said, I'm not dead against such a system, but I'm increasingly sceptical about its implementation.
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]