[SOLVED] Different writing systems

Q: Is it allowed to translate from Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese?

They only looks like different writing characters, but they cover same meanings.

First, I think the users did Chinese translations from Simplified to Tradition or Tradition to Simplified because of reading purpose or getting points. It’s hard to forbid the users to do it. My suggestion is to change the points as doing transliteration from 10 points to 2 points when the user select the translation in Chinese language.

Second, there are different things if the users translate Chinese to Chinese (Classical Chinese), Chinese (Cantonese), or Taiwanese Hokkien. Because these languages use same characters but they have to use different dialects to do translations. And then, the translation points still keep 10 points.

Separating Japanese lyrics into different transliterations makes no sense, because the writing systems are not meant to be used like that. Japanese writing systems are used in conjunction according to the text and grammar, they are not isolated. The song lyrics should be written according to the format in the booklet. In case that the lyrics say one thing but the singer says another, you should probably add an annotation or put the pronounced lyrics in parentheses using hiragana.

I agree with [@hankeat] that Traditional/Simplified Chinese are pretty much identical to native Chinese users, but I can imagine that some learners of Chinese might not feel the same and prefer having a choice.

In a long run, I think [@Туна Ченевская]'s idea of making auto translation for Traditional/Simplified Chinese is great. That will help with the reading purpose that [@Joyce Su] mentioned. For now, users should submit such translation through transliteration instead of translation if they really want to. In this case they can only get 1 point from each transliteration.

If we go for auto translation, we might need to go through issues like:
1) Which section will get the auto translation? (lyrics only / both lyrics and translation)
2) What do we do with characters having different forms in the two systems (e.g. 松/鬆 in Trad. Chinese Vs. 松 in Simp. Chinese; 唓 in Trad. Chinese Vs. no equivalent in Simp. Chinese)

Tagging [@lt] here, because it's them who add/remove languages from the Automatic transliteration tool.

Plus, in case of no equivalent, I suggest keeping the original character. It will be difficult technically and unnecessary if we create a new character following existing simplifying rules using TrueType ;)

Thanks for clarifying about the Russian transliteration part, Joshua. But still, the Chinese pinyin auto transliteration has huge amount of problems. In regular pinyin system, polyphones have different pinyin equivalents. That said, pinyin system is exactly indicating how Chinese characters should be pronounced. (As we know, unlike most of languages, pronunciation of Chinese characters can't be predicted merely by what it looks like.) That's why I'm suggesting an auto translation editing feature, giving accessibility to native speakers only.

I think having an editing function for auto transliteration may be losing the point of having it in the first place. If the auto transliteration is problematic for Chinese and Russian, maybe we can:

1) make suggestions on the list of characters that needs extra rules on auto transliteration. I've noticed just now that it is available to some extent in Japanese (e.g. from "は" to "ha" or "wa" depending on its semantic function).

2) add a line saying "Automatic transliteration. May contain errors." at the end of the auto transliteration of Chinese and Russian. This feature is available for Japanese as well. I suppose it is hard to cover all exceptions, so we can submit manual transliteration to cover the rest.

I think we can ask [@lt] if it is possible to auto convert the Chinese translations. Ideally, I would suggest it a requirement to select whether it is Trad. or Simp. when users submit a song or a translation in Chinese. Therefore, auto converter will work for the submission. Besides, there is also case that a Trad. Chinese character has 2 forms in Simp.. For example, 瞭 in 瞭解 would be simplified as 了解 while in 瞭望 it stays the same in Simp.. I think in this case we may need to input a wordlist for the converter to do the judgement. For example, when 瞭 is followed by 望, it will not be simplified.

Hi [@lt], thanks for your hard work on the improvements.

May I ask if it is possible:

1) to add a line saying ”Automatic transliteration. May contain errors." for all 3 Chinese auto transliterations (see also #16 and #17 for details)

2) for us to provide you a wordlist with rules to improve the accuracy of the auto transliteration (see also #16 for details)

3) to extend the auto transliteration of Simplified Chinese ⇄ Traditional Chinese to all languages / dialects that use Chinese characters. The list is here for your reference:
- Chinese (Cantonese)
- Chinese (Changsha Dialect)
- Chinese (Classical Chinese)
- Chinese (Hakka)
- Teochew
- Taiwanese Hokkien

Thanks!

Removed, thanks!

For Japanese transliteration on LT, a different software is used than for Chinese and Russian. For Russian we made some custom rules of our own, but for Chinese it seems too complicated. Perhaps a more effective solution for Chinese would be to enable google transliteration.