Gerard Meijssen wrote:
These languagecodes can then have a script associated
with them eg
cmn-Hans for simplified Chinese. When there are dialects within a
language they can be identified as well.
Using zh is imho utterly confusing and associating them with countries
does not help at all. More than one language is spoken in Taiwan and
therefore zh-hans-tw does not cut it. When you replace traditional with
simplified, within one language I can understand what you are doing.
However when you in essence start moving across languages and is that
not the implication when you talk about things having different
terminology are you then not trying to provide translations ?
The written language is much more closely standardised than the spoken
language. Speakers of mutually incomprehensible variants of Chinese
write in a common script based on Mandarin. Differences in terminology
do occur, and in some cases, such as "Cantonese colloquial", characters
are introduced to describe words in the local dialect that do not exist
in Mandarin. However, these differences are much easier to resolve in
software than full translation between languages written phonetically.
For conversion to zh-hk, MediaWiki uses a dictionary of 211 entries in
addition to the simplified/traditional tables, and for conversion to
zh-sg, there is only 15 extra entries.
Is it translation? Or is it just an spelling and terminology change,
like conversion from US English to Commonwealth English? Maybe somewhere
in between.
-- Tim Starling