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Formatting of Simplified Chinese & Traditional Chinese
Subject:Formatting of Simplified Chinese & Traditional Chinese From:Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 22 Jan 2003 08:41:22 -0800 (PST)
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Broberg, Mats asked
How do you deal with "bold", "italic" and other ways of emphasis when
localizing manuals to Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese?
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Mmmm, that's an interesting question. From what I remember about my CHinese studies, you're right, there isn't bold or italics in the sense that we have in European scripts. Thinking back to the Japanese magazines I used to read, I don't believe they ever used italics, but I sort of remember seeing bold. (Yes, I am fully aware the dangers of comparing the two cultures, I spent 4 years studying them tee hee). I do remember underlining (or side-lining in some cases hehe) being in used quite a bit.
What you might try doing is getting a demo copy of NJStar. They have both Chinese and Japanese word processors. YOu can take a look at how they handle such things as bold and italics. Their URL is http://www.njstar.com/. I used this word processor in college for my japanese classes and it wasn't too bad. It comes with a pretty hefty dictionary too, so that's always convenient.
May I also suggest you take a look at the XinHua newspaper online. http://www.xinhua.com.cn/ You'll need Chinese language support installed to view the site. You should be able to browse through those pages and see how they deal with using different kinds of emphasis.
You may also want to take a look at the Yamada Language Center. The URL is http://babel.uoregon.edu/index.html They may have some information on this issue, and other issues you may face. This is a shot in the dark though, because I haven't really taken a lot of time to search through that site.
If you do find an answer, let me know. You've got my curiosity peeked. :-)
Hope that helps.
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Sean Hower - tech writer http://hokum.freehomepage.com
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