[Commons-l] Chinese on Commons

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While browsing in my Special:Preferences today, I noticed that we
apparently support no less than five variants of Chinese:

zh
zh-cn (simplified, as used by the Chinese mainland)
zh-hk (traditional)
zh-sg (simplified)
zh-tw (traditional)

In translating the Commons namespace pages and templates, we seem to
most commonly have zh-hans and zh-hant, corresponding to simplified
and traditional characters. I think the "han" is to qualify the
language as Mandarin (also known as Hanyu, literally the language of
the Hans) rather than, say, Cantonese (zh-yue) or any other variety of
Chinese. I have noticed that people seem to have stopped using zh-tw
and zh-cn. Which makes sense: the country distinction is not what's
important in this choice. AFAIK there are no major differences between
Chinese as written in mainland China and Singapore, so I don't know
why we offer that distinction.

I don't even know why we still have people doing the man-hours of
'translating' between traditional and simplified when zh.wp is, after
all, using some automatic converter. Should we ask for it to be
installed for Commons? I don't know why it wasn't in the first
place... I have a small suspicion that the traditional folks enjoy
maintaining their translations, why is why no one's raised the issue,
but it's just a hunch.

Any thoughts?

Brianna (user:pfctdayelise)

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