Re: language code
On Sat, Mar 06, 1999 at 11:55:52AM -0500, James A. Treacy wrote:
|On Fri, Mar 05, 1999 at 10:06:54PM +0800, Anthony Wong wrote:
|>
|> I have checked out the necessary files from our cvs repository
|> and am going to translate them into Chinese. The problem is,
|> there are 2 different sets of Chinese characters: traditional
|> and simplified chinese (the former is used in Hong Kong and Taiwan,
|> the latter is used in mainland China).
|>
|> I anticipate that there should be two sets of Chinese translations.
|> In order to differentiate the two, can I use zh-<country code> as
|> the language code and ZH-<country code> as the 'slice name' in
|> the wml files? Will there be any problems?
|>
|> ('zh' means Chinese)
|>
|The important thing is to do what works. If people from different
|Chinese speaking countries would expect to see a particular font
|and would set the preferred language accordingly then you should
|definitely add the country code.
Yes, this is the case.
|This is not what first time users expect and even many browsers are
|set up wrong. I'd love a dime for every person that has written in
|because they get the japanese version of a file when their browser
|is requesting 'en-us, ja'. IE is the biggest culprit here. Are
|any of you surprised?
I can see that it caused a lot of confusion. But I'm not really
surprised, because IE comes from MS, you can't expect too much
from them :)
|BTW, do the charsets differ only in style? Can someone used to
|one style still read the other?
The charsets for traditional and simplified Chinese are Big5
and GB respectively. No matter which one you use, the grammar
of the language is the same, but how the characters are written
is different. This makes people who are used to only one of them
have big difficulty in reading the other one. Moreover people
living in different areas tend to give different translations to
technical terms (The Chinese translations of the word 'Internet'
are totally different in China, Hongkong and Taiwan!)
If there is no technical problems I will use zh-<country code>
throughout the .wml files.
Thanks,
Anthony Wong
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