We're wanting to do a VERY quick and simple localisation of an existing PC game of ours for Taiwan. I've already been invoved with the localisation of another product for China where we supported both Simplified and Traditional languages - we didn't run into any problems because we had loads of time and money to throw at it (that was another studio though). I'd be interested if anyone might know if we could get away with just supporting Traditional and save ourselves half the QA time. As I understand, Simplified Chinese is phonetic based on Mandarin and therefore is possibly only of any use to Mandarin speakers, and is also a little clumsy. I'm also interested to know if it's acceptable to only support text entry in western characters for stuff like user / profile name, server name for LAN and online games. Any other gotchas that anyone might be able to share would be great! Cheers, Andy

It's probably fine to go with traditional characters only. I'm under the impression that practically all (literate) mainland Chinese can at least read, if not write traditional form anyway.

You'll be fine with simplified only; only the taiwanese use traditional to any great extent, and since traditional is a super-set of simplified anyone who uses it can deal with simplified pretty easily. The opposite is not true.

Allan

Thanks, Odin. That's interesting.

Which might be reachable to the widest audience?
Simplified's the phonecic rendering of Standard Mandarin isn't it? -- won't that exclude any dialect-only speakers?

Andy

They're actually the same characters; Simplified just chopped out a lot of the ones that aren't in common use, and simplified the strokes a bit.

The other thing is that chinese isn't actually a phoenetic language; there's no correlation between the pictograph and the sound you'd make; so you could write in mandarin and read in hokkien without any problems. The emperor's solution to a fragmented population. That goes for both simplified and traditional.

Allan

My Wife is chinese and she said that the simplified would be best. She knows some of the traditional but if you target is younger then the simplified is the way to go. She said that not too many younger chinese use the traditional at all and just about everyone knows the simplified. Apparently the simplified IS traditional but without a lot of extra baggage. And even if the person didnt know the exact character of simplified they would get the gist of it. I think they call it an index.... Hope that made sense and helped you out.

i come from China.
Here's some infomation.

in main land of China,people use simplified character set named GB2312,include most simplified characters and little traditional ones.
in Taiwan people use traditional character set named BIG5.
in Hongkong another version of BIG5 named BIG5HK,very similar to BIG5.

the character set differ greately form each other and so do the words.

in China people use UNICODE set to deal with this problem,but this work must be done from the very beginning of a project.

if you cannot use UNICODE,mostly you have to make different versions to treat simplified character set and traditional one separately.

if you have interests in how to decode and display separate Chinese characters from complex stream,you may contact me at panic1227 at gmail dot com.

Thanks everyone for the information.
So it looks like Simplified is going to be the solution then.

Odin: Interesting that you mentioned Mandarin and Hokkien as my wife's from Singapore and speaks both those dialects! ;)

It seems I was misinformed about the phonetic nature of the simplified set... so what's MPS then (Mandarin Phonetic S..(um what was the 's' for?) )

Still, simplified should mean less memory used for the font, which is find by me.

I'm hoping to have any player names for the multiplayer game entered using the standard western character set to avoid having to change any keyboard code pages, does this sound ok to people?

Quote: Original post by Andy Severn
Thanks everyone for the information.
So it looks like Simplified is going to be the solution then.
....
I'm hoping to have any player names for the multiplayer game entered using the standard western character set to avoid having to change any keyboard code pages, does this sound ok to people?

That's the solution we went with, yeah. Haven't had any complaints so far, including from the Taiwanese guy who did localization QA.

Implementing a full IME is possible, but damn painfull; especially when you're supporting Chinese, Japanese and Korean in full-screen mode.

Quote: Original post by Andy Severn
Odin: Interesting that you mentioned Mandarin and Hokkien as my wife's from Singapore and speaks both those dialects! ;)

Same here.. I'm Norwegian, but married to a Singapore Chinese girl, and living down here in the tropics. Not a bad life ;)

Allan