> With your current rate, I very doubt to see 5.4.0 release this year. The only progress since april has been small changes to test code. You ignore the many patches bit rotting away on this mailing list. Right now you choke your repo. Why wait until 5.4.0 to change maintainer? Why delay what your repo needs?

https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00568.h...

The last two sentences really make it look as if he were trying to pressure the original author.

I don't think the website is trying to "emphasize the differences," just point out the issues with Google Translate: namely that the output for "zh-tw" does not reflect the language actually used by people in Taiwan, and to that end it betrays the trust of the user. Of course it only lists where the problems are, so it's not a balanced view by definition. It focuses on what needs to be fixed.

In particular, as similar as the two languages or variants are to each other, nearly all the vocabulary relating to modern technologies developed separately, and is fairly distinct. I've never tried it but I can imagine a Google-translated text heavy on computer-related vocabulary can easily end up being unintelligible to a Taiwanese, which constitutes poor quality of service on Google's part.

Taiwan is a separate market for Google, and from the business perspective they would do best not to alienate their users there. Of course it is a free service with no reasonable expectation of quality. But if someone went to the trouble of listing all the issues, the problem might be worth addressing even for purely reputational reasons. I read through the whole word list and I'd say it's at least 95% accurate. Frankly, I'm surprised it sparked such a debate.

As for "Mainland China," you are technically correct about the scope. The term has its use in certain contexts if one is aiming to be very precise (or pedantic). But here it's tangential to the discussion.

Anyway, the translation is wrong given the context as no numeral follows.

對岸 /duì àn/ 'opposite [side of the Taiwan] Strait' is a neutral term coined specifically to avoid the controversy.

If talking about politics, another neutral way could be to just say 北京 /Běijīng/.

As a matter of fact, a special "Cross-Strait" dictionary was developed to deal with all the language differences, with nearly 6,000 words and 30,000 phrases: https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10&post=19596

It hardly seems like "no big deal" to those who should know best.

Also, there is no reason for constantly calling it "Mainland China" where you could just as well call it "China," unless it is to further a political agenda.

Anyway, this is all beside the point. The concept of a "standard" language is political not linguistic. If Google is run as a business, not a political entity, their linguistic choices should reflect the language actually being used in any given market, and not be based on purported "standards" promulgated elsewhere. The same simple concept that somehow already works well for other language pairs that could be construed as similar to the point of being the same should also be applied here.

In particular, the phonetics of Mandarin Chinese underwent several waves of simplification to the point that many characters are pronounced pretty much the same - in particular, there are a lot of syllables pronounced /yi/ or /shi/.

So, transition to a purely alphabetic writing system would mean losing access to all the sophisticated texts of culture. There is even a poem illustrating that phenomenon, and taking it to the extreme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

More practically, everyone learns their first language as a child, and at that point does not get to decide whether something is too "crazy" to learn or not, since nobody asks their opinion.

Further simplification was attempted at some point by the Communists (also as a means to increase adult literacy) but they rolled it back quickly.

Also, it's not 20,000 "icons" to learn. There are a couple of hundred composing elements ("radicals," although it's not entirely correct to call all of them this), which just repeat themselves in different arrangements, and there are some rules to it. Beyond these, only a hundred or so characters have purely unique elements.

Translation quality is one issue, e.g. "加油！" being translated to 'add oil!' instead of something like 'keep up the good work!' which is what it is supposed to mean in this context figuratively. But there is also a bigger cultural issue in that Google developers do not allow for people being multilingual: just because I made a choice for the interface language doesn't mean I need everything else translated to it (with no opt-out).

Just a technical note: by HN guidelines, the submission URL must point to the original source but I also linked to a mirror that bypasses the paywall in a parallel comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603895

(Perhaps I should've labeled it "paywall bypass" instead of just "mirror" but I can't edit that post anymore.)

I can't speak for the collective "HN" but the interest in this topic might have something to do with the fact that a lot of people here believe anything but meritocracy is suboptimal and ultimately self-defeating in the longer run.

I decided to share this also because, no matter the topic, it's been a while since I've read anything so succinctly put, and getting to the gist of the matter, gloves off.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603895

It's a soft paywall anyway, there are multiple other ways to access the content.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603875

Points: 48

# Comments: 42

https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/

I'm not surprised Google is eager to take it down under any pretext, and not so eager to restore it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34706914

For years there's been another ranking with much better methodology:

https://www.jacdec.de/airline-ranking/

Although there are still caveats, with the main one being that past performance does not directly translate to future results, especially if there were significant changes to the airline situation in the meantime. Checking the recent reports from the Aviation Herald can also be revealing:

https://avherald.com/

According to this website, Air Asia is supposedly safer than Singapore. And Xiamen Airlines are safer than Cathay? CX and SQ have one of the best safety records, each only suffered a single hull loss, which is very little considering how long they've been operating.

Air Asia is not even a single operation but a bunch of separate airlines using the same brand for marketing purposes. Some of them have much worse safety record than the others (Air Asia Indonesia for example). One would think this also warrants a mention, considering KLM is labeled "Air France-owned" (which is sort of true but much less relevant). Also for consistency shouldn't Transavia then be labeled "Air France-owned" and not "KLM-owned?" Or maybe Air France should be labeled "KLM-owned" to give the more complete story.

In any case, it would be much more useful to know which airlines are government-owned, since this usually breeds regulatory collusion (especially if the regulator and the head of the airline happen to be the same person).

Anyone can put up a list on the Internet but this one is really misleading. If you want a better picture of airline safety comparison (still with many caveats), there's this one:

https://www.jacdec.de/airline-ranking/