(forwarded from the board address by Angela)
---- Forwarded message from "George Herzog" <goldy(a)ms19.hinet.net> ----
Date:
From: "George Herzog" <goldy(a)ms19.hinet.net>
To: "'Wikimedia Foundation'" <board(a)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