Chinese to Chinese conversion

[pne]

Note to self:

Paper on Chinese-to-Chinese conversion (simplified<—>traditional), by Jack Halpern and Jouni Kerman.

Comments

[bride.livejournal.com]

IMHO, we should just abolish the Simplified characters altogether. We don't need it, it was a half-step in the wrong direction. It's made the written language more vague and unclear. PinYin plus Traditional characters is all we needed.

[bicoherent.livejournal.com]

Ugh, do they really have to map between non-orthographic correspondences? This seems way too ambitious and pointless to me... I can recognize both 軟體 and 軟件, both 檔案 and 文件, and as far as I know, Wisconsin has always been written 威士康辛 even when simplified (then again, maybe Singapore just uses weird conventions).

Chinese-to-Chinese conversion

[pne.livejournal.com]

Ugh, do they really have to map between non-orthographic correspondences?

Depends on what you want to do.

If you just want to translate SC to TC, then you probably don't need to.

But if you have a document you want to be suitable for Peking and want to translate it into one suitable for Taipei, then yes, you should IMO.

Just like localising US software for the UK market involves more than just throwing away lots of u's; you'd need to replace "trunk" with "boot" when referring to a car, for example, or "sidewalk" with "pavement". I'd expect such lexical substitutions to be performed in material intended for a UK audience.

Similarly, I'd imagine that someone living in Kaohsiung would want to read a document in TC with Taiwanese terms where those differ from mainland/Shanghai/Peking/Singapore/whatever ones, rather than a straight SC-to-TC conversion.