We got a feedback suggesting that adding traditional Chinese version into our blogpost. This is a good idea indeed but it may cause the blogpost longer as usual. So we hope to get more feedback from you whether it is good to add a traditional Chinese version for the blogpost in the future. And we will spend some time to figure it out. Your feedback is much appreciated! :)

I was confused about that comment myself. In Malaysia do people use simplified or traditional characters? You should use whatever you normally use, no? If someone from Hong Kong or Taiwan posts to the blog, I would expect them to use traditional characters and not simplified. My friends from Taiwan probably wouldn't be able to write in simplified characters and would have to use a computer program or something to convert everything from traditional.

James

I think it's possible to get google translate to shift from simplified to traditional anyway.

Converting characters between simplified and traditional isn't always that easy.

As on Wikipedia: "A completely automatic conversion would need some AI features, and would be difficult."

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Automatic_conversion_between_simplified_and_traditional_Chinese

Also interesting, from the same page:

zh (no conversion)
zh-hans (generic simplified)
zh-hant (generic traditional)
zh-cn (Mainland China; simplified)
zh-tw (Taiwan; traditional)
zh-hk (Hong Kong and Macau; traditional)
zh-sg (Singapore and Malaysia; simplified)

Actually its the other way around, traditional (mandarin) to simplified (mandarin) is quite simple. It is simplified to traditional that is hard.

This is due to the case where there are 2 or more traditional characters that are all written the same way in simplified.

I am still confused about why you would want such a thing. Surely there is plenty of source material on the Internet without making Michelle generate an extra copy of her posts?

James

@jww1066

Malaysia started to use simplified in the 80's thus (chinese ethnic) people who are over 30 are more confortable with traditionals and youngers are now more confortable with simplified. Just like in Singapore, streets/shops signs are mostly (but not all) written in traditional (this is the food court located beside where I used to live in KL http://twitpic.com/1otdrx). Most of newspapers switched to simplified as well but some are still printing in trad (such as this one http://www.chinapress.com.my/)

I'm the one who asked for a traditional version because for those who are used to read traditional reading simplified isn't a very difficult experience but definitely a painful one. As Skritter is a service that helps us the learn BOTH script, I don't see why my request would be so "confusing"...

Of course I can use a Chrome plugin but as it's mentioned before, the result can be weird (“药” is traditionalized into "葯" which is wrong as it should be "藥")

Tortue, would you mind writing that post in old English?

(Less flippantly, it can't be an easy task to write something in a script you haven't learnt. Shall we ask her to write in in Japanese too? It's her personal post, she can write it in her own language -- it is merely peripheral to the service Skritter offers. James is quite right.)

I don't really see the connection with old English but still, As you can read in the comments what I'm ask is a mere request and definitely not an order.

Also, I haven't met yet any native mandarin people who are not able to type (handwrite is an another story) both scripts, so I assumed that it would also be the case with Michelle.

Yikes! I've never seen a feature request (and requester) be ridiculed before. Perhaps blog posts written only in the author's mother script are more authentic (or whatever), but ultimately the blog posts are for the readers, not the writer. We're not talking about a "personal post". Michelle is an employee of Skritter posting on the employee-only blog. I don't intend to reverse engineer the thinking behind what Skritter does, but the blog posts (including the culture posts) are clearly part of the service Skritter provides. Tortue's request is entirely reasonable.

People ask for Skritter to be translated all the time (from Flash to ObjectiveC). No one has ever suggested that the programmers should just use whatever programming language they learned first. No one got confused about why Skritter users might find an iPhone version more convenient.

(For the record, if a blog is in simplified Chinese, I will not read it. If it is in traditional, I might read part of it.)

@DependableSkeleton: no ridicule intended, I was genuinely confused about why this would be a good thing. I am also studying traditional characters, by the way. I have no interest in such a thing unless that's the way she would normally write, because, yes, the post would be an inauthentic text. I would rather go find other material on the Internet that is authentic (written by people who normally write in traditional characters).

James

I'm sorry James that I lumped you in with the "old English" comment.