;-) Do you have any connections in Taiwan using CF who do this for a living?
At 12:33 PM 8/3/04, you wrote:
>At 9:24 AM 8/3/4, Gonzo Rock wrote:
> > I am soliciting paid help with this project. Our large CF
> > application, (estimate ~900 cfm files), needs to be localized
> > for Taiwan.
>
>For finding a service, web searches like "localizing website chinese" pulls
>up services.
>
>For "Mandarin/Taiwan", it gets a little tricky. What we call "Mandarin" is
>a short-hand term for the spoken language usually called in English "Modern
>Standard Chinese", and is in practice Beijing-style speech with regional
>additions, called "Putongua" ("ordinary speech") on the mainland. In Taiwan
>the same spoken language is called "guoyu" or "national speech", and is a
>bit more strictly Beijing-style than Putongua. Guoyu joins the native
>Taiwanese spoken dialect, Min. All are called generically "hanyu" or
>"Chinese speech", as well.
>
>But for written language, Taiwan and mainland China use slightly different
>character sets, and there are still political ramifications about the
>characters in which text is written. Websites use one of the GB encodings
>for Simplified Chinese. The mainland communists in 1956 reduced the total
>number of characters and simplified many, in hopes of increasing general
>literacy. Taiwan retained the larger set and more complex writing of
>characters, and use Big5 encoding.
>
>It's possible that some websites in Taiwan today might want to translate to
>Simplified Chinese, especially considering the increased business
>interaction between Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland these days, but if
>it's for an internal audience then the Traditional character set would
>likely be preferred.
>
>Aside from the Simplified/Traditional split, the written language is fairly
>constant across the whole country... for spoken language, Putongua is the
>official standard, but is often taught as a second language in many parts
>of China (dialects abound). Finding out precisely which "chinese" the
>customer wants would be a necessary step before contacting a translation
>service...?
>
>(For more info on the above, http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/china
>has tons of good articles.)
>
>Summary: Mandarin is spoken, but websites are written, and both spoken and
>written forms of Chinese are in flux.
>
>Sorry I made the problem even harder, but.... ;-)
>
>jd
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