As explained in my previous article I am having my website translated to several languages, one of them is chinese. Here are some of my notes.

Chinese is the biggest language in the world. In fact there are many Chinese languages that share the same writing system. and to make it more complicated there are two Chinese writing systems: traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese. Traditional Chinese is used by about 23 million people in Taiwan, and by about 5 million people in Hong Kong. Maybe some of the 40 million Chinese expats will be able to read traditional Chinese as well. And maybe about 1% of the over 1300 million mainland Chinese inhabitants will find it fashionable to be able to read traditional Chinese in addition to simplified Chinese.

So I estimate the number of people reading traditional Chinese to be at most 40 million and that number is expected to slowly decrease. Besides writing Mandarin in traditional Chinese is probably understandable the Cantonese in Hong Kong but different from writing Cantonese in traditional Chinese writing.

Fortunately I found a translator that offered to translate to both writing systems, and translating to traditional Chinese at a high discount. Fortunately really ? We will see, it is a lot of work for me to cut and paste the extra translation to my content management system.

Besides, what is the difference anyway ? About 25-30% of the characters are different, but a much smaller percentage of the characters is really unrecognizable different. So probably even in Taiwan people won't have much difficulty with simplified Chinese. Another question is whether searching the internet on a search string in traditional Chinese will return pages in simplified Chinese containing the search string in corresponding simplified characters. Maybe not yet, but otherwise soon.