> I am soliciting paid help with this project. Our large CF
> application, (estimate ~900 cfm files), needs to be localized
> for Taiwan.
For finding a service, web searches like "localizing website chinese" pulls
up services.
For "Mandarin/Taiwan", it gets a little tricky. What we call "Mandarin" is
a short-hand term for the spoken language usually called in English "Modern
Standard Chinese", and is in practice Beijing-style speech with regional
additions, called "Putongua" ("ordinary speech") on the mainland. In Taiwan
the same spoken language is called "guoyu" or "national speech", and is a
bit more strictly Beijing-style than Putongua. Guoyu joins the native
Taiwanese spoken dialect, Min. All are called generically "hanyu" or
"Chinese speech", as well.
But for written language, Taiwan and mainland China use slightly different
character sets, and there are still political ramifications about the
characters in which text is written. Websites use one of the GB encodings
for Simplified Chinese. The mainland communists in 1956 reduced the total
number of characters and simplified many, in hopes of increasing general
literacy. Taiwan retained the larger set and more complex writing of
characters, and use Big5 encoding.
It's possible that some websites in Taiwan today might want to translate to
Simplified Chinese, especially considering the increased business
interaction between Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland these days, but if
it's for an internal audience then the Traditional character set would
likely be preferred.
Aside from the Simplified/Traditional split, the written language is fairly
constant across the whole country... for spoken language, Putongua is the
official standard, but is often taught as a second language in many parts
of China (dialects abound). Finding out precisely which "chinese" the
customer wants would be a necessary step before contacting a translation
service...?
(For more info on the above, http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/china
has tons of good articles.)
Summary: Mandarin is spoken, but websites are written, and both spoken and
written forms of Chinese are in flux.
Sorry I made the problem even harder, but.... ;-)
jd
John Dowdell, Macromedia Developer Support, San Francisco
(Best to reply on-list, to avoid my mighty spam filters!)
Technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/
Technical daily diary: http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_jd
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