On Thu, 16 Sep 2004 09:08:50 -0400, zhengzhu <zhengzhu(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As someone pointed out before, the problem is not just
on the
character-to-character mapping. Some concepts are expressed entirely
differently, for example, 电脑(electronic brain) vs. 计算机(calculator or
computer). A second example will be translations of foreign names, for
example, Croatia is translated in Mainland China as 克罗地亚,but 克罗埃西亚in
Taiwan. This kind of difference can be arbitrary, and will likely
evolve along time. It is mainly this kind of difference that requires
a special markup.
This does seem to be a different issue: there are bound to be multiple
variations in the language over and above the character conversion,
but these are *cultural*, and there's no guarantee [or I doubt there
is] that there won't be people that write in Traditional, but use the
vocabulary/whatever normally associated with Simplified. You can also
be pretty sure that there are plenty of cases where there are more
than two ways of saying something; or more than one way within
mainland China, say (it's a big place, is it not?). As I said before,
this is true of en:, but given that we can all basically understand
each other, most people seem to consider trying to find a technical
solution a waste of time.
If:
a) there are genuinely *exactly two* dialects of Chinese [written]
vocabulary, and users of each of these map *exactly* to users of each
of the character systems
or:
b) we want to create a system that can store any number of related
languages/dialects in one database: e.g. all the Scandinavian
languages [and are prepared to support *more than two* versions of
Chinese]
then:
we need to worry about differences in vocabulary/usage
else:
we can use Mark's simplified system as a special case for converting
between Traditional and Simplified Chinese.
I could of course be entirely wrong, but that's how I read the situation.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]