Re: THEORY: Expanding in translation?

MorphemeAddict@WMCONNECT.COM wrote:
> I've gotten two answers from Cucumis about the difference in average length
> of translations to traditional Chinese vs. simplified Chinese.
>
> The first was that people are more careful and formal when writing in
> traditional characters, less so in simplified characters.
>
> I don't see how that can be true.
>
> The second was that there just isn't very much traditional Chinese text to
> compare the simplified text to, so the averages are different because of a
> paucity of data (small sample size).
>
> I'm going with the second reason.
Isn't Traditional Chinese still preferred in Hong Kong, Singapore,
Taiwan etc.? Of course there would be less writing due to a lower
population, but surely it's not so small an amount that results begin to
be wrong? There'd still be millions of users in Hong Kong alone...

The thing about formality I could buy if there's a lot of premodern
texts in the database. I don't know if anyone would've gone to that much
trouble to actually digitise enough texts to alter the information.

Is it possible that writers from Hong Kong, used to Cantonese, do not
write things the same way as writers from Beijing, used to Mandarin?

--
Tristan.

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