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With regards to Chinese entries, can we have some way of distinguishing between Traditional and Simplified entries?
In fact I was thinking to add an option to convert sentences in simplified chinese to traditionial chinese, and vice versa, wouldn't it be better that way ?
Yeah that's a good idea. Means that all the existing entries, in either Traditional or Simplified will be preserved.
The other thing regarding Chinese translations that probably needs consideration, is that there are 3 or 4 major regions where Chinese is spoken (Taiwan, Hong Kong, PRC, Singapore), but each region often has a slightly varied vocabulary set to represent the same meanings in another language. I'm no expert on this, but I'm pretty sure a Taiwanese person would translate the English word "Potato" to "馬鈴薯" whereas in the PRC (Mainland) they more commonly translate it to "土豆". Maybe we need the ability to choose the "Region" of our Chinese translations?
Yep we have recently migrate the code of language from iso 639 alpha 2 (name of languages coded on 2 letters) to alpha 3,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639
which allow us to make more precise distinction about languages (as you can see there's already shanghainese)
but for the moment the problem is not really technical, but mostly ergonomical "how do we present it in a nice way, without overloading a sentence with billion of buttons",
moreover the problem can exist with french, canadian french etc... so I agree, its something we will need to handle one day or another
after we need to keep in mind that a beginner maybe don't want to see these regional variations, and only focus on "standard" version, so here come again the ergonomic problem
in fact for the moment if you plan to add "regional" sentences, just add in () which region it is, that people will be aware its not standard mandarin
I will notice you when we will be starting handle this :)
by the way thanks for your contributions :)
(French ?)
Yeah I understand.
(When you get round to it, you could possibly make the flag icon a drop-down list of regions for that language, so that if we want to we can mark the translation as region specific.)
By the way I really like your site :).
I'm an Australian studying in Mainland China.
In fact for the moment the flag icon is used to change the language if the tool used to detect automatically which language your sentence is do a bad job (which happen with shanghainese /mandarin, or close language such as ukrainian and russian)