Re: Establishing zh_HK team

[Abel Cheung <abelcheung gmail com>]

On 1/3/06, Christian Rose <menthos gnome org> wrote:
> I see the teams are now named "Chinese (China)", "Chinese (Taiwan)",
> and "Chinese (Hong Kong)", instead of the old "Chinese (simplified)"
> and "Chinese (traditional)".
> Is this naming really politically correct? I mean, there is probably a
> good reason the translations are commonly called "traditional" and
> "simplified", instead of anything else, in other projects and other
> software.

The words "simplified" and "traditional" only refers to the set of
glyphs usable; those using simplified glyphs include mainland China,
Malaysia and Singapore. OTOH, those using "traditional" (and more
complex as well) are Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau people. However,
"simplified" and "traditional" doesn't distinguish the subtle wording
and locale (such as time/date etc) differences between all these districts.


> For GNOME, it is probably important to use conventional namings where
> possible, instead of names that may be offensive in some way, if we
> can avoid it.
> But I'm no expert. So are you sure this will be ok?

This also happens in KDE too; KDE people are asking me the same question.
Using _geographical_ district name is the only way to avoid offence so far,
yet able to distinguish the difference of each district, and make the
naming expandable in the future.
In particular, using ISO names is almost certain to generate huge flamewar;
Debian has stepped into that hole before. Of course, this would need zh_CN
team's agreement as well. But seems I can't reach Funda Wang these days.
Funda, are you here?

Abel


>
>
> Christian
>


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Abel Cheung   (GPG Key: 0xC67186FF)
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