Re: Language tag for traditional Chinese

[Alex Vong]

Hello Tobias, Ludo,

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <address@hidden> writes:

> Ludo', Alex,
>
> On 2018-03-05 9:45, address@hidden wrote:
>>> The locale should be zh_TW (for Taiwan), zh_HK (for Hong Kong) and
>>> zh_mo
>>> (for Macau). Should I use a let to avoid duplication?
>>
>> As long as the above sentence is intelligible to people from all these
>> regions, it’s enough to write “zh” I guess?  (It’s meant to be a
>> language tag for humans to read, not an actual locale specification.)
>
> I'd definitely avoid that. For better or worse, ‘zh’ is assumed to
> equal ‘zh_CN’ or simplified Chinese.
>
I agree. In written Chinese, the 2 dialects of simplified and
traditional Chinese are quite different. Not only the characters are
different (of course quite a few are still shared), sometimes the
wording is different too due to cultural difference (similar to British
vs American English). So we should at least have 2 different locales I
think.

> If a single code for traditional Chinese is required, Wikipedia has
> this to say:
>
>   ‘The World Wide Web Consortium recommends the use of the language
> tag zh-Hant as a language attribute value and Content-Language value
> to specify web-page content in Traditional Chinese.’[0]
>
> In practice, the locale ‘zh_TW’ is often used instead. For example:
>
>   ‘The standard locale for simplified Chinese is zh_CN. The standard
> locale for traditional Chinese is zh_TW.’[1]
>
> ...but I don't like that very much. I'd go with the W3C, but I'm not
> exactly a native speaker. Alex?
>
I would also like to follow W3C if possible. However, I am not sure how
well it is supported by browsers? Is there some way to test it?

Also, I see that guix has simplified Chinese translated in
'guix/po/guix'. Are we required to use the same locale in guix and in
the web page?

I also want to add tranditional Chinese translation to guix in the
future (after I figure out how to use handwriting recognition). I think
I will still use the zh_TW since I think it is an established convention
for distro. But I am not sure if the same convention holds for web
page.

> Kind regards,
>
> T G-R
>
> [0]:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters#Computer_encoding
> [1]:
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4892372/language-codes-for-simplified-chinese-and-traditional-chinese
>
> Sent from a Web browser. Excuse or enjoy my brevity.

Cheers,
Alex

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