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Ask HN: Translating my site to Chinese - Traditional or Simplified?
What's better and more popular in order to target a lot of Chinese: Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese? The site has mobile phone related contents and basic tech vocabular
- SeanLuke 15y agoTraditional: Hong Kong and Taiwan. Simplified: Mainland China.
- pace 15y agoThanks! To get the highest reach => simplified To get a good reach with better purchasing power => traditional Best => both Is this right? And with which would you start, higher reach or better purchasing power?
- xtirpation 15y agoI wouldn't characterize the languages in those terms. It really boils down to who your site needs to reach. If it needs to be read by people in Mainland China, simplified is the way to go. If it needs to be read by people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and pretty much anywhere else, it should be in Traditional Chinese. Preferred language is tied to regions, not purchasing power. What I mean is that it's not something like "the rich learn Traditional and the poor learn Simplified", it's kind of like whether a person grew up learning the English spelling of a word or the American one. Except the differences aren't as subtle as they are in English. If you're not sure which geographic group you're trying to reach, you should translate the site into both Traditional and Simplified. However, don't expect the same translated site to reach both groups, especially if you're going to be using tech vocabulary since that varies even more from place to place.
- hboon 15y agoSingapore and Malaysia reads Simplified Chinese and not Traditional Chinese. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan reads Traditional Chinese. While simplified Chinese is getting much more popular in Hong Kong, some of Hong Kong's traditional Chinese is meant to be read in Cantonese, a dialect. So it's not so straightforward. I doubt there is a correlation between Traditional/Simplified Chinese and purchasing power.
- SeanLuke 15y agoThis is like saying "I need to construct an application for the Iberian Peninsula. Educate me: should I do it in Spanish or Portuguese?" Answer: Portugal -> Portuguese Spain -> Spanish Your question is not "what script should I pick?". It is essentially "what country should I pick?"
- fezzl 15y agoAlso, there's Traditional Cantonese Chinese and just plain old Traditional Chinese. The vocabulary and grammar differ.
- robjohnson 15y agoGo with simplified. Your target audience can more than likely comprehend both and simplified is MUCH more common outside of newspapers and government documents.
- sunliang 15y agoUse Simplified Chinese you can definitely cover more people. If you use Traditional Chinese you may cover only 1/10 of the people(Taiwan, Guangdong, HK, some oversea Chinese) of Chinese people if not less.
- pace 15y agoThanks for all the comments! It's not about traditional or simplified. It's about which first. We are rolling out to all languages world-wide and wanna start with the most relevant ones for getting high reach fast.
- vonstark 15y agoTraditional Chinese is better, because even people from china can read them. but for example Simplified, some Taiwanese and HonKongese can't read.