In reply to the following: >Thanks Chris,
>You asked - Has any "expert Chinese reader" actually noted any problem? >Last October, I had some discussions with a Chinese friend who had noted >numerous issues in our previous ChiUns module. I'm trying to re-establish >contact with him. If he doesn't respond soon, I will discuss this topic >with some of my other Chinese friends. >In theory at least, there may be issues with mechanical conversion, >particularly if this is done only at the individual codepoint level. The >need for "one to many" replacements, as well as to go to higher levels than >individual characters could have serious consequences, including some >instances where the meaning is changed. >Further to this, as the module has Strongs and other markup, this may mean >that doing the conversion on the source text (OSIS) will cause the semantic >context to be obscured by the interspersing of XML elements. >Thanks for the lead about the built in tool in Mac OS X. While I was >Googling, I came across http://openvanilla.org/ http://openvanilla.org/ >"OpenVanilla is a collection of popular Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and >symbol input methods and language tools. It is also easy to customize or >create your own input methods with OpenVanilla's flexible design. Available >on Mac OS X and Windows." >Evidently, the Mac OS X Chinese text converter is based on this. > >I'm also pursuing some other lines of research (another conversion tool), >though not yhet ready to report on the outcome. >Finally, what MediaWiki uses for this task is freely available as a PHP >script, though I have not looked further than this page yet. > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Automatic_conversion_between_simplified_and_traditional_Chinese > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Automatic_conversion_between_simplified_and_traditional_Chinese >David To which module is this discussion referring, exactly? I would be happy to look up some passages and see if I notice any particular errors with the conversion. However, I do know that any mechanical conversion should be checked over carefully by a native expert. The Chinese use automated tools, but they will also tell you that those tools leave a lot of things that have to be corrected by hand. It is not a simple one-to-one conversion, since sometimes more than one character was simplified to the same simplified character. The conversion from simplified to complex is always a touch more problematic, but the other direction also frequently leaves problems. Matthew
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