From: Edward H Trager (ehtrager@umich.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 13 2003 - 15:45:17 EST
On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Rick Cameron wrote:
> The Win32 API includes a function that can do this folding, on Windows
> NT/2000/XP: LCMapString, with the option LCMAP_SIMPLIFIED_CHINESE or
> LCMAP_TRADITIONAL_CHINESE.
>
> I know little about Chinese, but I have the impression that it is much more
> common for several traditional characters to correspond to one simplified
> character than vice versa. If that's true, it seems to me that it would make
> most sense to fold to simplified.
>
> - rick
Hmmm ... Suppose I'm searching for some relatively obscure traditional
character that occurs mostly in Wen Yen (u+6587 u+8A00 : Classical
Chinese) and has a very specific meaning in Classical Chinese. This
character gets "folded" or "mapped" to a fairly common character in modern
bai hua (u+767D u+8BDD) Chinese, and then the search proceeds. The result
set contains hundreds or thousands of irrelevant results related to the
modern meaning, and I still have to sift through them looking for the
needles in the haystack. I'll try to provide a concrete example once I
think of one ... it's been a long time since I studied Classical Chinese.
>
> This "folding" is much easy that implementing a full-fledged
> simplified<->traditional conversion (which needs to be context sensitive and
> dictionary-driven), because the result is just in a temporary buffer used
> for comparison, and no one is going to see it.
>
> _ Marco
>
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