Need Help from Chinese Speakers
 

Sigil uses transifex for translations. I can handle and understand most of this except for the Chinese (zh) language codes. I see 3 codes instead of the expected 2.

I expected zh_CN to be simplified Chinese.
I expected zh_TW to be traditional Chinese.

All based on my searching and reading on websites.

But we have 3 zh related language codes on transifex for Sigil.

There are the expected ones:

zh_CN and zh_TW but there is also just a zh code with no region.

When I diff the translation files, it is clear that zh_CN and zh have very few differences and many are just whitespace differences, whereas zh_TW and zh seem to have many more differences.

So is zh different from zh_CN enough to warrant including a third translation for basically the same language. Sigil releases are already big downloads, and I do not want to include a language variant that is not significantly different from another.

So if zh_CN really represents simplified Chinese and zh_TW really represents traditional Chinese (ignoring regions and country boundary claims here) what does zh (no region code) bring to the table?

Thanks for any help here.

Don't know if you stumbled upon my topic from a few months ago:

"Should Chinese Fonts be Embedded in Ebooks?"

Many of the CJK languages use the same character, but display differently depending on the language/font:

Like 返 (U+8FD4) can be displayed 5 different ways:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:S...Difference.svg

Unsure, unsure. But in Post #8 of the above thread, I also linked to talks discussing common Asian-language bugs/issues within open source programs.

Also, "Source Han Sans" is one of the major CJK fonts designed by Adobe. They also have a lot of great documentation discussing many ins-and-outs and differences between the languages (punctuation alignment, etc. etc.).

https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-han-sans/

I haven't done too much research into it since then, and since I can't read/write any Asian languages, it all looks too similar to me (probably why so many "western" programs have so many Asian-rendering bugs!).

Yes, what I am comparing really has nothing to do with fonts. I compared the two different .ts files as utf-8 byte sequences.

I just need to know if/how "zh_CN" translation is different from just "zh" translation. The difference between zh_CN vs zh_TW is simplified versus traditional so that is understood.

I think, no. I think just combine zh and zh_CN is OK. It may have difference in meta, so may be needed in Default Language For Metadata, but for User Interface Language of Sigil, I think just remain zh_CN/zh_TW, or more exactly, zh-Hans/zh-Hant will be fine.

Thank You!

The only input I can offer is that I seem to vaguely remember some sort of dispute between two of Sigil's Transifex Chinese translation camps. I don't remember if it was these two or not. I could be way off base, though.

Hope not. I really do not plan or want to bundle two versions of the same language, just because they can not agree.