Converting between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese

Does iWork '09 Pages offer tool to convert the text between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese?

Pages itself does not do that, but OS X has a system-wide ChineseTextConverter which is found in the Services item in the Pages (or other app) menu. How well this works to do what you need I don't know.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8951.html

That is:

+Menu > Pages (or any cocoa app) > Services > ChineseTextConverter > Convert Selected Simplified Chinese Text/ Convert Selected Traditional Chinese Text+

From what I heard from my Chinese translator it works but there are not always direct word/character swaps. ie There are words and characters in Traditional that do not exist in Simplified and vice versa.

Peter

Tom Gewecke wrote:
Pages itself does not do that, but OS X has a system-wide ChineseTextConverter which is found in the Services item in the Pages (or other app) menu. How well this works to do what you need I don't know.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8951.html

I did not even know that! Thanks! A similar function is available from the flag menu when Chinese input is chosen, but the services work everywhere.

For Peter's statement, that it is not a one to one match, that is absolutely correct. Mostly that is not a problem, but it does not hurt to verify the output.

Let's for example assume you write "Taiwan" in traditional characters: 臺灣. The text converter transforms this to 台湾, which are perfectly correct simplified characters. Now, if you convert it back to traditional, you get 台灣, which is not where you started. However, this is perfectly acceptable in most contexts. Both spellings, 臺灣 and 台灣 are correct in TC.

As far as I recall, there are cases where you may change the meaning and lose information through mechanic conversion, but I do not remember any examples.

There are peculiarities in both the Traditional Chinese used in Hong Kong (for Cantonese) and Taiwan (for Mandarin) due to their histories. Hong Kong Cantonese is heavily infiltrated with English and other European words and has this has a back effect on the Cantonese spoken in Guagzhou but written in Simplified.

I can remember one problem character back from when I did Chinese DTP and that was "Emu". There was no Traditional character for it and we always had to patch in the Simplified Character.

Whilst I don't know the specifics I do know that the HK Traditional has been extended by a large number of characters to accommodate their European expressions. Presumably these exist nowhere else.

Peter

PeterBreis0807 wrote:
I can remember one problem character back from when I did Chinese DTP and that was "Emu". There was no Traditional character for it and we always had to patch in the Simplified Character.

Fascinating! It sounds like a ridiculous statement. Surely they must have known of emus in China even before the simplified characters were introduced, and surely they must know of them in Taiwan and Hongkong today.

However, you seem to be right. I assume you are talking about the 鶓 character in 鴯鶓? If one tries to locate it among the TC characters in the Character Palette, it is nowhere to be found. It is missing in some TC fonts, but it is present in some. There is no input code for it in pinyin or zhuyin, but strangely enough there is one in Cangjie. It is a strange character indeed.

Whilst I don't know the specifics I do know that the HK Traditional has been extended by a large number of characters to accommodate their European expressions. Presumably these exist nowhere else.

I think you are on a slightly wrong track here. It is true that HK Traditional has plenty of characters for words that exist only in Cantonese, but very few of the additional characters are for European loan words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese

I am working from recollection of an article several years ago that in Hong Kong they had extended the character set, to accommodate new words in use in the Territory. I presumed they were for English technical expressions.

I do know that Hong Kong has somewhat bastardised Cantonese, because my relatives told me how the Cantonese speakers in Guangzhou were picking up the HK Cantonese because it sounded "cool".

Amongst my in-laws I always have a rough idea what they are saying from the smattering of words that I understand and the liberal dose of Chinglish thrown in.

I dare say the HK movie industry is to blame for a lot of this.

It is interesting to see what happens to languages used within a wider language group. My Italian friends use some hilarious twists on Italian because of the English influence. When they go into town they say "noi schoppare" which in Italian is to go on strike, but here means to shop. Their word for farmers is Farmisti not Agricoli. I imagine the Italians growing drugs in Griffith must find that doubly amusing.

Rocky Gattellari the Australian-Italian boxer was a frequent TV guest in Italy when I was there because they thought his Australian-Italian dialect was hilarious.