NOTE TO TRANSLATORS (2004-02-03): The Debian web team has started removing translations that are more than six months outdated from the English version. So if you want to start translating a new page, first check the CVS and see if there is an (perhaps extremely outdated) deleted version! You may save some work that way. Chuan-kai Lin Some notes and ramblings on Chinese translations (and the fun of maintaining both Big5 and GB pages and hope that all the characters show up properly. :-) Note: This document may contain Big5 code. Content Negotiation: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ lang charset ------ ------ ------- zh-CN .zh-cn Big5 zh-TW .zh-tw GB2312 Big5<->GB is quite a challenging problem. Big5 is *bad*!! Its relationship to Unicode is _not_ one-to-one, and is giving us a lot of headaches. Fortunately, in the upcoming Unicode 3.0, much (if not all) of this issue would be resolved. The following is from ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/EASTASIA/OTHER/BIG5.TXT # WARNING! It is currently impossible to provide round-trip compatibility # between BIG5 and Unicode. # # A number of characters are not currently mapped because # of conflicts with other mappings. They are as follows: # # BIG5 Description Comments # # 0xA15A SPACING UNDERSCORE duplicates A1C4 # 0xA1C3 SPACING HEAVY OVERSCORE not in Unicode # 0xA1C5 SPACING HEAVY UNDERSCORE not in Unicode # 0xA1FE LT DIAG UP RIGHT TO LOW LEFT duplicates A2AC # 0xA240 LT DIAG UP LEFT TO LOW RIGHT duplicates A2AD # 0xA2CC HANGZHOU NUMERAL TEN conflicts with A451 mapping # 0xA2CE HANGZHOU NUMERAL THIRTY conflicts with A4CA mapping # # We currently map all of these characters to U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER Another reference is the Big5+ standard tables. At least it won't leave any Big5+ codes dangling. :-) It does include a Big5+ to GBK table, but then, we want GB, not GBK. Hmm... Converter ~~~~~~~~~ * Don't bother with tcs. Due to the traditional/simplified character issue, tcs simply doesn't work well at all. * utf-converter works but need more tweaking to get everything translated properly. (1999-12-28 update: Nah, let's not bother with utf-converter when we have zh-AutoConvert. :-) -- Anthony Fok , Fri, 16 Apr 1999 05:11:03 -0600