Answering questions in traditional/simplified Chinese, Cantonese/Mandarin

Question

I think it is important to talk about this. I'm a Mandarin speaker and I normally don't answer questions that asked in traditional Chinese/Cantonese, because it is very likely I don't have the best answer.

However, I have seen people answer questions in traditional Chinese/Cantonese when the questions are asked in English/Mandarin/simplified Chinese. I think in this case, the answerer should let the poster know that the answer is in traditional Chinese/Cantonese, especially the poster doesn't show a high level of competence in Chinese.

Maybe we should guide the asker to state whether they are learning Mandarin or Cantonese too. What do you think?

Answer 1

At the end of the day we want answers to be helpful to the person asking and the community. Answers completely in Chinese typically get flagged to mods by the system and we leave a polite message and sometimes delete if there is no further update. It's hard to force people to answer in a particular way because the system doesn't prevent it.

If you see something which isn't helpful then flag it and one of the mods will review it (eventually).

There are two rules which are more guidelines; the person asking and answering should try and include some English to benefit the majority of people using the site (English speakers learning Chinese), secondly the person answering should follow the format used by the person asking, so if it is mainly English then the answer should be mainly English to assist the learner.

Strict rules are hard to put in place and require a number of active people to enforce.

Answer 2

There are differences in commonly used words in different regions.

For example,
小姐 means "Miss" in Taiwan and is used widely every day. You can try to call a female 小姐 in China and see what will happen.

Another example,
The sentence, 你吃飽了嗎？ is a greeting in Taiwan. But it seems to be a bad sentence in China.

Therefore, I suggest that the users should use their own glyphs, TC or SC, so that the readers can know where the contents come from.

I think it's readers' responsibility to convert the glyphs.
1. The above reason.
2. Be independent. Don't rely on anyone.
3. You will read the other glyph sooner or later.
4. You are the one who is learning Chinese.
5. There are good converters out there. Why don't you install one of them?

It's better to use a converter that is an extension of your browser.
1. Faster. You don't have to do the copy-and-paste.
2. Complete. The whole page can be converted. You can see only the copy-and-paste part with an on-line converter.
3. Off-line.

By the way, if you obtained what you wanted to know from an answer with the other glyph, you should accept it too. The users take their precious time to help you, you should appreciate them too. Right?