I just started translating some of UI into Chinese. I can see the change in the footer section. However, I can’t figure out why some of the words are emboldened while others are not. When I inspected the style for the footer, it seems like it is expecting Traditional Chinese. The TC in “Noto Sans CJK TC” stands for Traditional Chinese. See the screenshot below.
As you can see from the screenshot, when I modified the headers to include both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, the words in Simplified Chinese look shrunken, while the words in Traditional Chinese are consistently emboldened.
Is there a way to fix this issue so that both Simplified and Traditional Chinese look good?
I just found out that Noto Sans/Serif TC cannot display some Simplified Chinese words, resulting in tofu where the word is not supported. But I’m not sure if Noto Sans/Serif SC can support all Traditional Chinese characters.
This screenshot is captured from Google Fonts Noto Sans TC page:
It can’t render 术. If you look at the Rendered Fonts on the lower right corner of the following screenshot, you can see that 3 glyphs are rendered using network downloaded fonts Noto Sans CJK TC Regular, one glyph is rendered using locally installed font Noto Sans SC Thin. That’s why 术 in 技术信息 is thinner. The browser falls back to a font family installed locally. If there is no locally installed font that can support the simplified Chinese character, I suspect we’ll get tofu in the browser. This may need to be verified by uninstalling all Simplified Chinese font families in my computer. I’ll do that if I have time to kill.
That said, being ignorant of Chinese fonts, I wonder if it makes more sense to translate the user interface into Traditional Chinese. With the corpus of Chinese sutras in Traditional Chinese, it makes more sense to follow the character set of the scriptures. There isn’t any difference in writing Traditional and Simplified Chinese on computer, just as long as I don’t have to hand write Traditional Chinese. But I seldom read or write Chinese, so I may be missing some nuances.
Or, perhaps, UI should use Simplifed Chinese while the scriptures should stick to Traditional Chinese? Or maybe, we should bring this discussion to github? I’m muddle-headed right now. Time to doze off.
