Re: Re: Hindi and Software

[Biju Chacko <biju@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 07:39:15AM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> If you put it this way, a guy speaking / writing chinese in one part of china
> cannot understand a guy at the other end of china / in hong kong thanks to
> differences in the way chinese characters are interpreted.  Chinese being
> ideographic, this is a real problem there as well.  That hasn't stopped
> localized stuff from being rolled out in china, has it?

Sorry for the OT stuff but...

In actual fact there is no language which can be called Chinese. There are
numerous languages spoken in China, the most popular being Mandarin and
Cantonese. However, they share a common script. Since it is made of ideograms,
the concepts being written down are entirely independent of the language of the
writer. For example, if the writer wanted to write: "The dog is inside the
house", he would write the symbol for dog, the symbol for house and the symbol
for inside or contain. Thus you could say that there is a seperate written
	chinese that is a different language from the various spoken chinese
	dialects.

This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. On one hand, you can create apps
with out worrying about the language of the user. On the other, there are
something like 5000 different ideograms to manage.

So the chinese experience of localisation is not really applicable to India.

Biju


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