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marco
Employee
Employee
Status: In development

Add Chinese as a supported language for translations in Firefox.

75 Comments
Winston_Sung
New member

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
New member

@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
New member

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
Making moves

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

Status changed to: Trending idea
Jon
Community Manager
Community Manager

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 😀

Jeppie
Making moves

   I was expecting that japanese was the most wanted language but i see now that i was wrong about that. I wished more people wanted japanese like with chinese.    

Progress2000
Making moves

@JeppieThat make sense since there are a lot more Chinese native speaker (including me) compared to Japanese. I cannot even find a page in Mozilla Connect to support Japanese. I would also like to support it if I find a page since more language support is better.

 
 

 

 

 
 

 

 

Jeppie
Making moves

 @Progress2000 i didn't know that. I see now i misunderstood everything because i was only thinking about from chinese to english and not the opposite. Sorry ;(       btw here is the japanese idea. You probably didn't found it because it's old. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/japanese-translate-option-in-firefox-translations/idi-p/22959            

Winston_Sung
New member

Simple mutual translation is generally applicable between Mandarin (Simplified Han script) and Mandarin (Traditional Han script).
> Unless it is a professional lawyer, finance, or diplomatic field, otherwise, it won't cause too much misunderstanding.
> For example, chip = (called "芯片" in mainland China and "晶片" in Taiwan) can be understood in most cases.

Not at all. I've seen cases with misconversions like:

For the word "information", which was misconverted into "message"
zh-Hant "資訊" (information)
=> (correct conversion) => zh-Hans "信息" (information)
=> (incorrect conversion) => zh-Hant "訊息" (message)
=> (incorrect conversion) => zh-Hans "讯息" (message, Traditional Han term)

Denir
Making moves

I would rather prefer various Indian languages and other asian languages to be added than Chinese.

Jon
Community Manager
Community Manager

@Denir if there are languages you'd like to see supported, please submit a request in the Ideas section.

laoshubaby
New member
tempwall
Strollin' around

As a product manager,I'm a little shocking when I found there is even no plan for Chinese in the add-on instruction.

More and more Chinese are glad to know more from the world, they need a translator. Chrome had refused China mainland, edge is growing rapidly, why firefox is still waiting?

We could have simplified Chinese first, than convert to traditional Chinese with some fix-up. The most obvious reason is more users in China mainland, and most people from Taiwan and Hongkong could also understand the simple version of Chinese easily.

If it is needed, some Chinese big company may be willing to help. Tencent had published their multi language translation addon 腾讯翻译 in the firefox addon market.

Jeppie
Making moves

@tempwallmozilla needs people that speaks chinese and are able to translate to other languages. It's not easy to find asia people that speaks western languages.

laoshubaby
New member

@Jeppie As far as I know, the community in China is very willing to contribute to supporting offline Chinese translation, and many of us can use English fluently in writing.
Do you means you need to add support for Chinese to other languages? Can we only consider Chinese-English translation in the initial stage?