

Ask HN: Translating my site to Chinese - Traditional or Simplified? - pace

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
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SeanLuke
Traditional: Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Simplified: Mainland China.

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pace
Thanks!

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?

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xtirpation
I 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.

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hboon
Singapore 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.

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vonstark
Traditional Chinese is better, because even people from china can read them.
but for example Simplified, some Taiwanese and HonKongese can't read.

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sunliang
Use 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.

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pace
Thanks 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.

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robjohnson
Go with simplified. Your target audience can more than likely comprehend both
and simplified is MUCH more common outside of newspapers and government
documents.

