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Translating deck to Traditional Chainese #655

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KnowScratcher opened this issue Nov 14, 2024 · 7 comments
Open

Translating deck to Traditional Chainese #655

KnowScratcher opened this issue Nov 14, 2024 · 7 comments

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@KnowScratcher
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Hello, I would like to translate this deck into Traditional Chinese because some transitions in Simplified Chinese don't work in regions using Traditional Chinese.

One main question is, according to the CONTRIBUTING.md

In most cases, the language code should match the Wikipedia subdomain for that language
There's already Simplified Chinese occupying the code "ZH", what should I put for the language code?

Another question is that the encoding of the files is unknown or unrecognized for Excel, how can I open and edit it?

Please let me know if there's more for me to keep in mind while translating.

Thanks.

@ukanuk
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ukanuk commented Nov 14, 2024

I do not know the right answer. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias and also https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedias_in_multiple_writing_systems show that some options could be:

zh-hans, zh-hant, zh-cn, zh-hk, zh-mo, zh-my, zh-sg, zh-tw

More information appears to be in https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E5%AD%97%E8%AF%8D%E8%BD%AC%E6%8D%A2, but I cannot read that.

Ultimately you might be the right person to make this decision, as you may have more information than us. And, it's not a very big deal anyway. Something as simple as zh1 and zh2 would still fulfill 99% of the needs of a translation; it would just be a tad harder for users studying Chinese to figure out which deck version they should use and edit.

As for your issue with Excel, maybe one of the other translators will be able to share what they did.

@ruin1990
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Traditional Chinese has subtle differences in many regions. You can first translate it to see if there are any differences in corresponding characters, because 1% of the characters are different.
If this happens, wouldn't it be better to differentiate by region?

@KnowScratcher
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Traditional Chinese has subtle differences in many regions. You can first translate it to see if there are any differences in corresponding characters, because 1% of the characters are different. If this happens, wouldn't it be better to differentiate by region?

I see your point, and I must clarify that the translation I meant was Traditional Chinese for Taiwan. I've noted it as "zh-tw" as most websites do. By the way, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese(Taiwan) have many different characters and even different translations, which is one reason I wanted to translate them into Traditional Chinese.

@aplaice
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aplaice commented Nov 21, 2024

@KnowScratcher thanks very much for offering to contribute a translation! It's greatly appreciated!

Regarding the language code I agree with @ukanuk and @ruin1990 (btw thanks for your comments!) that using something like zh-cn and zh-tw for the two translations would be a sensible solution. (zh-hans and zh-hant is also an option, but probably worse for the reasons noted by @ruin1990.)


However, first, is it the case the current Simplified Chinese translation is not easily usable for people accustomed purely to Traditional characters? I expect the answer is no, it's not easily usable for everybody, but I'd just like to make sure before you do a lot of work!

(If it is easily usable (people learning from the deck won't be confused and/or significantly slowed down (e.g. "translating" all the characters on the go)), then I'm not certain that we would want a Traditional Chinese version, since every translation adds overhead for later expansion of the deck. For comparison, we don't have an US English version, even though it might be nice to have, since the version with British English is perfectly comprehensible to people from the US. However, a different set of characters is clearly a greater difference than minor spelling changes and slightly different preferred vocabulary.)


Another question is that the encoding of the files is unknown or unrecognized for Excel, how can I open and edit it?

Unfortunately, I have little experience with character encodings and locales, especially on Windows(?). The files are UTF-8 encoded which should be readable/importable everywhere.

Maybe if you provide more info on Excel/OS version and system locale somebody else could provide suggestions?


Also, just to make sure, do I understand correctly that automatic conversion of Simplified into Traditional is not really viable? Looking at what Wikipedia does — the best descriptions that I could find are here, in English and here, in Chinese (via Google Translate) — it's pretty complicated with many edge-cases.


Thanks again!

@axelboc
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axelboc commented Nov 21, 2024

We've ran into this Excel issue before. Excel just doesn't like UTF-8-encoded CSV files, sadly. 😢 I'd recommend using another program or even an online CSV editor.

@KnowScratcher
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@aplaice

However, first, is it the case the current Simplified Chinese translation is not easily usable for people accustomed purely to Traditional characters? I expect the answer is no, it's not easily usable for everybody, but I'd just like to make sure before you do a lot of work!

Thanks for noticing me. I've made sure that there will be many differences between these two languages and that the Simplified Chinese translation is not easily usable for people accustomed purely to Traditional characters. Thus, I would continue to translate this project.

@aplaice
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aplaice commented Nov 22, 2024

Great! Thanks for checking! I hope you've resolved or managed to work around the encoding issues!

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