Re:Ask HN: Translating my site to Chinese - Traditional or S...
by hboon on Monday October 03, 2011 @12:03PM
(#3066779)
Singapore and Malaysia reads Simplified Chinese and not Traditional Chinese.
Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan reads Traditional Chinese. While simplified Chinese is getting much more popular in Hong Kong, some of Hong Kong's traditional Chinese is meant to be read in Cantonese, a dialect. So it's not so straightforward.
I doubt there is a correlation between Traditional/Simplified Chinese and purchasing power.
Preferred language is tied to regions, not purchasing power. What I mean is that it's not something like "the rich learn Traditional and the poor learn Simplified", it's kind of like whether a person grew up learning the English spelling of a word or the American one. Except the differences aren't as subtle as they are in English.
If you're not sure which geographic group you're trying to reach, you should translate the site into both Traditional and Simplified. However, don't expect the same translated site to reach both groups, especially if you're going to be using tech vocabulary since that varies even more from place to place.