Support Chinese translations

[marco]

Add Chinese as a supported language for translations in Firefox.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[wuyanzheshui]

it is a good ideal

[Jeppie]

  Does this mean Chinese is coming because a employee said it?  

[Jon]

@Jeppie These were moved over from GitHub. It means we want Connect to be the place where users can voice their support (and vote) for a given language. So keep on voting and sharing your thoughts. Thanks 🙌

[lurkrazy]

Due to the existence of The Great Firewall, users in China cannot access various translation APIs stably, so it would be very helpful to support Chinese in local translation.

[laoshubaby]

That's good, support Chinese means quite a lot of user can enjoy this untracked offline translation while browsing the Internet. (Chinese is indeed a language with a lot of speakers)

However, had Mozilla already distinguished the Simplified variant and Traditional one? Maybe those 2 kinds of Chinese should offered separately.

---

BTW, @Jeppie , this connect thread was converted from https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations/issues/583,  and that issue was opened by a Firefox user.

[luanyes]

Good

[Olvcpr423]

Chinese is the language with the largest number of native speakers in the world, I believe adding Chinese as a supported language for translations in Firefox could bring enormous convenience to Chinese-speaking users.

[xx1]

这东西还用得着投票？。。虽然这样说可能冲动了点。但是如果连世界上占了1/5的语言都不支持的话。这个翻译就是个残缺的。

This thing still needs to be voted on? . . Although that may be impulsive. But if even 1/5 of the languages in the world are not supported. This translation is incomplete.

[Progress2000]

I hope Firefox could include Traditional and Simplified Chinese as 2 different languages because they are quite different. Thank you!🙏

[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`.