Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and to one degree or another various Chinese communities around the world. Taiwan is obviously the 800 pound gorilla here.
Taiwan has come to develop its own style of written Chinese -- think US vs British English but more nationalistic. So the question is: when Google Translate converts to traditional characters should it also be translating into Taiwan's written patois [not to be confused with the Taiwanese dialect]? After all, Google Translate does not differentiate between Britain and the US in English (it sadly uses British). And there are other groups which use traditional without this patois (Hong Kong, say, though likely not for long), albeit in fewer numbers.
The author does have one good point, and that is that Google Translate is mistakenly describing traditional as zh-TW, that is "traditional as used in Taiwan". As long as it insists on doing that, it should be translating into Taiwan's written patois. But what it should be doing instead is describing traditional as zh-Hant.
I'm a bit confused—can you think of some examples where GT would default to British English translations over American English?
Italian("Uso l'acensore") -> "I use the lift"
Italian("Provo l'acensore") -> I try the elevator"
Wrong way around? I just checked and it seems to use American (sadly).
It's not a spoken language. It's only for written text.
> only in Taiwan?
Only in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and oversea Taiwanese/HK communities.
Taiwanese is another language... but let's use your simplified terms for now. Well, yes, pretty much this. It's not that different from writting "fish and chips" as "fish and fries" in British English.
Who’s mainly responsible for there to this day being no ISO standard for transliterating Cantonese, and its conspicuous absence from Google Translate (despite the whopping 86 million speakers—consider that Translate supports, say, Welsh, Basque, Dhivehi, and many others that are spoken by fewer than even one million), is probably obvious. That entity is much helped by the issue being opaque to most foreigners, who are sufficiently baffled by a completely different writing system to just not care and bundle all languages written in Chinese script into one basket.
Imagine a world in which Google Translate has one entry called “Latin” for anything using Latin script (Welsh, Irish, you name it) and another entry “Simplified Latin” for English.
There's no ISO standard because there's no actual standard. Even just within Hong Kong there are multiple systems in use.
It’s not as if there were no attempts to introduce a standardised way of transliterating Cantonese (like Pinyin for Mandarin) that got shot down by (you guessed it) mainland Chinese. They happen to have a lot of votes in relevant committees and consider this national interest as they try to maintain authority across a very diverse set of people speaking different languages.
Because otherwise the default explanation for why there's no ISO standard for Cantonese romanization is the same as why there's no ISO standard for romanizing Burmese, or Malaysian Jawi etc. There's little demand internationally for such a standard.
And if the Hong Kong government's standard, or the Guangdong government's standard (this one presumably preferred on the Mainland) is officially blessed by ISO, would people currently using something else really switch just because of ISO?
When saying “little demand internationally”, could you clarify what international demand was there for a standard for romanizing Mandarin and why that is somehow not applicable to Yue?
Said standard getting ignored by most Burmese people in favor of ad-hoc romanizations, similar to Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and Guangdong mostly ignoring various standards published by their respective governments.
> Jawi is a dialect of a language spoken by fewer than a thousand people total.
Malaysian Jawi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawi_script is not a dialect, but an Arabic-derived writing system for Malay. While not all Malay speakers use it, it's certainly more than a few thousand.
> what international demand was there for a standard for romanizing Mandarin and why that is somehow not applicable to Yue?
Mandarin is an official language of the UN, whereas Yue isn't.
Standard being ignored by laypeople doesn’t make it any less useful in formal contexts sensitive to ambiguity.
However, it is worth noting that there was basically an iron curtain between China and Taiwan for a long time after Chiang Kai-shek went there. A lot of IT terminology for example developed separately in Taiwan and China, so a lot of technical terms are different. The following website lets you look up scientific terms and convert them between china mainland and taiwenese.
also pinyin is pinyin. what you are describing is wade-giles, which was the common romanization technique of chinese well into the 20th century. it is not an "unintuitive pinyin" system because it is not pinyin at all. the error exists because the technology systems of the products you used did not support it. someone had to write tooling to convert pinyin into the correct chinese characters, they are the ones who forgot to do the same for wade-giles in taiwan.
it is like complaining that you couldn't get anywhere in uzbekistan because they currently use a "unintuitive local latin script"
Traditional characters are still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, while simplified characters are standard on the mainland and in Singapore. However, traditional characters are still used in some niche cases on the mainland (such as decorations, names of shops and restaurants).
Whether a translation to "Traditional characters" should default to Taiwanese-flavored Mandarin is an open question.
Taiwan is its own country. India has a similar population to China. Why not just translate into Urdu or Tamil instead, by that logic?
I used the word China in other comments because I didn't know what to call it otherwise, hoping that in the context of Taiwan it is clear what I mean
對岸 /duì àn/ 'opposite [side of the Taiwan] Strait' is a neutral term coined specifically to avoid the controversy.
If talking about politics, another neutral way could be to just say 北京 /Běijīng/.
Under no circumstances is Taiwan every seriously referred to as "China," not even "Republic of China," the official name in the constitution, is really used anymore. The passports now prominently say "Taiwan," and polling indicates that "Chinese" identity in Taiwan is dying swiftly with the settler colonialist KMT.
The sibling comment may be referring to political discussions between politicians, especially when talking with PRC officials. I'm not sure, I've almost never heard those terms used except by really weird super-KMT taxi drivers.
The parent comment that "Taiwan calls itself China" is simply incorrect, and the government mentioned, in the 70s, was a KMT totalitarian government that's been essentially overthrown as of the 90s.
So it's both incorrect and disingenuous to say "Taiwan calls itself China."
And so does Tsai Ing-wen:
> “We don’t have a need to declare ourselves an independent state,” Tsai told the BBC. “We are an independent country already and we call ourselves the Republic of China, Taiwan.”[0]
So it's not factually incorrect. Of course the issue is fraught and just saying "the country on Formosa is called the Republic of China" would be completely deceptive, but nobody is doing that.
Talk about Chinese politics is always heated but I don't appreciate being accused of being disingenuous.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/15/tsai-ing-wen-s...
Furthermore, though Tsai Ing-Wen is the president of the RoC, as I said, there's a rising independence movement separate from the settler-colonial government of the RoC. Among these people, and the majority of Taiwanese, Taiwan is "Taiwan," and "RoC" is at best a formality, at worse an unchosen government underwritten by an unchangeable constitution.
The new passport illustrates the point decisively: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Republic...
_Passport_2020.svg){kind=link}
If you're unintentionally muddying the waters that's one thing, but I react strongly because I strongly oppose anybody that assists the PRC's cultural imperialism.
It is not. Traditional Chinese is not used in mainland china. It was superceded by simplified Chinese in areas controlled by the Chinese communist party.
This is a rather basic piece of knowledge when discussing Taiwan and Chinese relations.
They speak the same language in China and Taiwan: Mandarin Chinese. The question is whether to use more Taiwanese-sounding phrases when traditional characters are requested.
This seems purely political and obviously divisive: Taiwan (& HK) has its own history and China doesn't want it to.
They addressed this:
> NOTE: The Google Translate menu only says "Chinese (Traditional)". However, if you pick the option, you will see the language code reflected in the URL is zh-TW, which means "Traditional Chinese as being used in Taiwan". The alternative option for Google to fix this problem is to officially drop zh-TW support and switch to an appropriate language code instead, such as zh-Hant.
Sure, zh-TW is somewhat misleading. But they nor say that parameter is a ISO 639 or RFC 5646 conformed.
Ignorant person here (sorry if I'm asking a dumb question), but given the larger population of China to Taiwan, why is that not the correct thing to do? Or is this "Traditional Chinese" a language spoken only in Taiwan?
When translating to Dutch, I wouldn't expect it to output Dutch as it is spoken in Belgium, Suriname, or Limburg either; I'd expect it to output Dutch as the main body of speakers speak it. They should get their own language designation instead, if the software wants to support translating into variants of the language