At first glance I thought it was a far-fetched conclusion but then I read in a subsequent reply he wrote:
> 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?
Oh wow, all his posts are trying to pressure Lasse, or guilt him into getting Jia on board. They're definitely conspiring.
"Your efforts are good but based on the slow release schedule it will unfortunatly be years until the community actually gets this quality of life feature."
"Patches spend years on this mailing list. 5.2.0 release was 7 years ago. There is no reason to think anything is coming soon."
"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?"
"Progress will not happen until there is new maintainer. XZ for C has sparse commit log too. Dennis you are better off waiting until new maintainer happens or fork yourself. Submitting patches here has no purpose these days. The current maintainer lost interest or doesn't care to maintain anymore. It is sad to see for a repo like this."
"Is there any progress on this? Jia I see you have recent commits. Why can't you commit this yourself?"
"Over 1 month and no closer to being merged. Not a suprise."
Yes, but the island of Hainan is considered part of "Mainland China," while the mainland areas of Hong Kong and Macau are not, so in this context it's a purely political term, trying to shape reality as opposed to just describing it.
Is having "lived in Taipei for almost three years," really enough to confidently claim that "this is not a big deal at all?" Especially if you "use Google Translate every day of [your] life," presumably not because you're proficient in the local language?
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.
If, as you are claiming, the Taiwanese don't have their own Taiwanese Mandarin, with their language being just the same as the Mandarin used in China, how can it be that at the same time they also don't get to have a say in what constitutes the "standard" of that "common" language they share with the "mainland?"
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.
> If, as you are claiming, the Taiwanese don't have their own Taiwanese Mandarin, with their language being just the same as the Mandarin used in China
This is like saying the Canadians and the Americans each have their own unique language. They speak the same language, with small dialectal differences, and small differences in official standards (semi-official, in the case of the US). The internal differences in Mandarin as spoken in different regions of China are far larger than the differences between the ROC and PRC standards.
In the case of the PRC and ROC (now commonly known as "Taiwan"), the PRC standard is derived from the ROC standard, so emphasizing the differences is somewhat strange. They're very closely related to one another.
> 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.
"Mainland China" and "China" are not synonymous. Mainland China comprises the provinces of the mainland and Hainan. However you define China, at a minimum, it also contains Hong Kong and Macau, which are not part of "Mainland China." Hong Kong notably uses traditional characters, and it has slightly different standards than Taiwan.
> 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.
Google's Chinese translations are so utterly terrible that this entire discussion is almost moot. I seriously doubt that Google is trying very hard to adhere to any particular standard version of Chinese. If you want decent Chinese <-> English translations, use DeepL.
Whether Taiwanese Mandarin is a separate language or not is a matter of opinion. Delving further into this debate will not lead to an interesting discussion as the definition of what constitutes a language is ultimately blurry. So I'm not making a claim either way, just an observation that you can't have it both ways: if the languages are separate, whatever goes on in China is irrelevant. If it is the same language, then the way it is spoken in Taiwan is no less "standard." It seems you agree with the latter, so let's leave it at that.
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.
> Whether Taiwanese Mandarin is a separate language or not is a matter of opinion.
There are dialect pairs where the question of whether they are separate languages is blurry. Taiwanese Mandarin and the official Mandarin of the PRC are nowhere near the level of difference where this question even arises. Mutual intelligibility is unproblematic.
> 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.
If users were actually selecting "Taiwanese Mandarin," as opposed to "Chinese (Traditional)," and if Google were doing a decent job of translating into Chinese in the first place, I would agree with you. But neither is the case.
Because it's part of the cultural heritage. Very much like the weird spelling of many English words is.
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.
I'd say perhaps 5 or so of the ~100 entries on the list are somewhat debatable. The rest seems pretty obvious and indisputable, and among these I would count the "通過"/"透過" that you mentioned. If anything, perhaps the whole list is too focused on the IT lexicon. But it's pretty much solid work, doesn't really deserve a "mixed opinion" - in my opinion.
Thing is, Google forces their translations upon everyone. For example if I want to check Taipei restaurant reviews on Google Maps with my interface language set to English, each of them shows up translated (poorly), and I have to click or tap every time to "see the original."
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:
> 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.