simplified to traditional by magic? -- a computer question

feng

榜眼
I like regular (traditional) characters. It's something of a fetish, I admit it. But so much of the web, and so much of my time on the web, is in simplified characters. Maybe that can be changed by magic?

Comedian John Oliver is behind new Firefox and Chrome apps (called Drumpfinator) that automatically change every instance of "Trump" to "Drumpf" (but not trump, TRUMP (well, sometimes), trumpet, etc.). It worked in all the web pages I tried, except usatoday.com's wacky pop-up article pages. That got me thinking . . .

What if one made such an app that changed simplified characters into regular (traditional)? There are almost 170 (I forget) more or less common characters that disappear in the PRC, and that would be something to overcome, but let's say there are 2,500 (a wild guess) common characters that are different between the PRC and Taiwan (this goes a little beyond the PRC's two lists of simplifications and the PRC's List of Variants). Would it be possible to do the same thing Oliver got someone to do for the Drumpfinator app to change web pages automatically as they load? Or would changing dozens or hundreds or even more characters on a page be too much for a brower app to do?

Thank you for sharing your knowledge ;)
 
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mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
The one-to-many mappings are the problem there - takes a lot of intelligence to figure out which one to use in some cases. (理/里 is particularly thorny)
 

alex_hk90

状元
I like regular (traditional) characters. It's something of a fetish, I admit it. But so much of the web, and so much of my time on the web, is in simplified characters. Maybe that can be changed by magic?

Comedian John Oliver is behind new Firefox and Chrome apps (called Drumpfinator) that automatically change every instance of "Trump" to "Drumpf" (but not trump, TRUMP (well, sometimes), trumpet, etc.). It works in all the web pages I tried, except usatoday.com's wacky pop-up article pages. That got me thinking . . .

What if one made such an app that changed simplified characters into regular (traditional)? There are almost 170 (I forget) more or less common characters that disappear in the PRC, and that would be something to overcome, but let's say there are 2,500 (a wild guess) common characters that are different between the PRC and Taiwan (this goes a little beyond the PRC's two lists of simplifications and the PRC's List of Variants). Would it be possible to do the same thing Oliver got someone to do for the Drumpfinator app to change web pages automatically as they load? Or would changing dozens or hundreds or even more characters on a page be too much for a brower app to do?

Thank you for sharing your knowledge ;)
It would be fairly simple to do all the one-to-one mappings automatically, in a similar way that website translation services work (instead of translating from Chinese to English, it would "translate" from Simplified to Traditional). As you and @mikelove have mentioned, the difficulty is in working out the correct Traditional character where there is a one-to-many mapping. Similar methods as automated translation services could again be used, looking at the characters surrounding it and combining it with frequency tables, possible user input, etc.
 

Wan

榜眼
@feng If you just want to convert characters in webpages simp<->trad, and if you happen to use firefox, check out this addon: New Tong Wen Tang. Haven’t tried it in a while, but it used to work decently a couple of years back.
edit: Just saw this addon also exists for chrome.
 

feng

榜眼
@feng If you just want to convert characters in webpages simp<->trad, and if you happen to use firefox, check out this addon: New Tong Wen Tang. Haven’t tried it in a while, but it used to work decently a couple of years back.
edit: Just saw this addon also exists for chrome.
My eyes thank you! I just installed it in on Firefox and have started playing with it :cool:

Thanks to Mike and Alex, also. I am glad to know this is not a big technical hurdle. The one to many I think is only a big problem for some characters, or so I imagine, but yes I can see 裏/裡 vs 里 and some others could present real issues. It is something for me to ponder :p
 
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feng

榜眼
The Firefox version was a godsend. They no longer appear to support Firefox.

The Chrome version was never useful to me, and it still isn't. I also don't use Chrome much.
 

feng

榜眼
It's a pretty good addon and you might find it useful.
No, thank you. The item discussed above was not for translation into another language. It was for transposing between simplified and traditional characters, and vice versa.
 

pdwalker

状元
It's a pop up dictionary that gives shows both the traditional and simplified forms of the character(s).

While I hardly consider that a translation into another language, nor does it convert a whole web page on the fly, it is useful for when you want to see what the the character is in the other set which I believe is related to the original question.

Feel free to use it, or not.
 

feng

榜眼
It's a pop up dictionary that gives shows both the traditional and simplified forms of the character(s).

While I hardly consider that a translation into another language, nor does it convert a whole web page on the fly, it is useful for when you want to see what the the character is in the other set which I believe is related to the original question.

Feel free to use it, or not.
The link you gave me
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/zhongwen-chinese-english/
is a Chinese-English dictionary. It bills itself as such. It is just that. This thread is not about that.

The add-on you recommend happens to include traditional and simplified characters (with incorrect notes in one case I noticed in one minute of using it) with the translations and pronunciation. This is not even in the same category as the add-on mentioned above, and hence not of use to me. I know what PRC forms look like; I want an app like Tong Wen that allows me to indulge my regular character fetish.
 
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