Support Chinese translations

[marco]

Add Chinese as a supported language for translations in Firefox.

[cmj]

@Progress2000 

I think this is quite simple because the conversion between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese is a very mature technology. The most difficult part here is how to translate other languages into (any kind of) Chinese.

Edit: It's not simple to convert between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. See Winston_Sung's comment below.

[Winston_Sung]

Support the idea, but:

> Chinese translations

Is this referring to

• zh-Hans / zh-Hans-CN / zh-CN - Simplified Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified Han script),
• zh-Hant / zh-Hant-TW / zh-TW - Traditional Chinese (Mandarin, Traditional Han script),
• zh-Hant-HK / zh-HK - Traditional Chinese - Hong Kong (Mandarin, Traditional Han script, Hong Kong terms),
• zh-Hans + zh-Hant,
• or all of them?

[Winston_Sung]

Also, please do note that there are wide term differences between zh-Hans, zh-Hant(-TW) and zh-Hant-HK.

[Winston_Sung]

As a MediaWiki Language Converter developer & MozTW community member:

> I think this is quite simple because the conversion between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese is a very mature technology.

Negative.

There are too much 1-to-multiple character & term conversions,
even the Language Converter for Wikipedia-zh cannot always handle them correctly and need many manual fixes.

See "Manual conversion rules" on Wikipedia-zh and the existence of "Module:NoteTA", "Module:CGroup/*" in many pages.

[cmj]

@Winston_Sung 

I apologize for my comment. I only realized the ease of converting between various Chinese languages on Wikipedia without knowing that there were flaws in the converter. Thank you for correcting me.

Regarding which Chinese languages to support (you mentioned this in the GitHub Issue), I believe we can use the support list of Azure Text Translation service as an example, which only supports `zh-Hans` and `zh-Hant` among all variants of Chinese, while providing limited support for `lzh` (Literary Chinese) only as a target language. Since `lzh` is rarely used among modern people, we can focus on supporting `zh-Hans` and `zh-Hant`.

[Winston_Sung]

I have to mention that do NOT mix "lzh" with "zh-*", as "zh-*" for almost all use cases in BCP 47 / ISO 639 language codes were referring to "cmn", which is "Modern Standard Mandarin".

Please not to mix "Mandarin language(s)" with "Sinitic languages" ("Chinese language group"), "Literary Chinese language".

[laoshubaby]

@cmj 

Sure, `lzh` is not commonly used in everyday life, but in academic usage. So there's no urgent need for it. (Classical Chinese isn't even used in Firefox's translation).

If time and resources can only support 2 kinds of variants, maybe a general `zh-Hans` and general `zh-Hant` (mixed word usage from TW and HK, but in most cases it follows TW's usage) can be chosen. Although this isn't the most accurate and unfair to users of smaller regions, but this is really the easiest to handle S/T Chinese.

---

And for Azure's service, many people or organization had attempt to create a robust transform solution, such as openCC or Wikimedia, but they all still have many unpolished detailed issues, cause a lot of "海記憶體知己"-like problem.

[xx1]

1、zh-Hans\zh-Hant【简体跟繁体】中国大陆的年轻人大多是没有学习过繁体字的。但是他们好像天生就可以看得懂繁体字。至于文言文，并不常用。而且语境很复杂。

2、【简体、繁体】 简单的互译大多数情况下是适用的。除非是专业的律师、金融、外交领域。不然并不会造成太大的误解。例如chip=（大陆叫做芯片，台湾叫做晶片）。大多数情况下都能看懂

------------------------fanyi.baidu.com（Baidu Translation）-----------------

1. Zh Hans zh Hunt [Simplified vs. Traditional] Most young people in Chinese Mainland have never learned Traditional Chinese characters. But they seem to be born to understand Traditional Chinese characters. As for Classical Chinese, it is not commonly used. And the context is very complex.

2. Simplified and Traditional: Simple mutual translation is generally applicable. Unless it is a professional lawyer, finance, or diplomatic field. Otherwise, it won't cause too much misunderstanding. For example, chip=(called a 芯片 in mainland China and a 晶片 in Taiwan). Can be understood in most cases

[Progress2000]

I agree with @cmj we can focus on supporting `zh-Hans` and `zh-Hant` because lzh is rarely used by modern people and website.

[Jon]

Hey all,

This is now a “Trending idea” here on Mozilla Connect, which means it’s one step closer to reaching our internal teams for review—learn more about The Idea Journey.

Please keep the conversation going and stay tuned for updates 😀