Monday, April 27, 2009

A note about Taiwanese translation

There is actually no translator within SL supporting Taiwanese.
The words "simplified" and "traditional" refer to the characters used, not the language that's written in them.
Google translates into Mandarin and Mandarin Only.

There are seven major Chinese dialect
Mandarin (850 millions), Wu 90M, Yue (Cantonese) 80M, Min 50M (including Taiwanese), Xiang 35M, Hakka 35M, Gan 25M

The simplified character set is mostly use in Republic of China, Singapore, Malaysia, the traditionnal set in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.
Debat on traditional and simplified Chinese characters

From Wiki pages


About 70% of the people in Taiwan belong to the Hoklo ethnic group and speak both Standard Mandarin (officially recognized by the ROC as the National Language) and Taiwanese Minnan (commonly known as "Taiwanese"; a variant of Min Nan spoken in Fujian province). Standard Mandarin is the primary language of instruction in schools; however, most spoken media is split between Mandarin and Taiwanese. The Hakka, about 15% of the population, have a distinct Hakka dialect. Aboriginal minority groups still speak their native languages, although most also speak Mandarin. English is a common second language, with some large private schools providing English instruction. English is compulsory in students' curriculum once they enter middle school. English as a school subject is also featured on Taiwan's education exams.
...

About Taiwanese Min-nan


Taiwanese Min-nan is a variant of the Min Nan Chinese language spoken by about 70% of the population of Taiwan.
This language is absolutely not supported by Google.
Min is the only branch of Chinese that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese.
This may account for the difficulty in finding the appropriate Chinese characters for some Min Nan vocabulary.
This is maybe also part of the reasons why it is almost totally mutually unintelligible with Mandarin or other Chinese dialects.
Mandarin and Min-nan are 62% phonetically similar and 15.1% lexically similar. In comparison, German and English are 60% lexically similar

Everyone interrested into languages can find detailled informations on chinese languages here:
Chinese Language
Taiwanese Min-Nan
Min-Nan

Q-Translator 0.27 supports both "Simplified" & "Traditionnal" characters as target character set for Mandarin.

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