Ask HN: Translating my site to Chinese - Traditional or Simplified?
What's better and more popular in order to target a lot of Chinese: Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese? The site has mobile phone related contents and basic tech vocabular
Simplified: Mainland China.
To get the highest reach => simplified
To get a good reach with better purchasing power => traditional
Best => both
Is this right? And with which would you start, higher reach or better purchasing power?
Preferred language is tied to regions, not purchasing power. What I mean is that it's not something like "the rich learn Traditional and the poor learn Simplified", it's kind of like whether a person grew up learning the English spelling of a word or the American one. Except the differences aren't as subtle as they are in English.
If you're not sure which geographic group you're trying to reach, you should translate the site into both Traditional and Simplified. However, don't expect the same translated site to reach both groups, especially if you're going to be using tech vocabulary since that varies even more from place to place.
Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan reads Traditional Chinese. While simplified Chinese is getting much more popular in Hong Kong, some of Hong Kong's traditional Chinese is meant to be read in Cantonese, a dialect. So it's not so straightforward.
I doubt there is a correlation between Traditional/Simplified Chinese and purchasing power.
Answer:
Portugal -> Portuguese
Spain -> Spanish
Your question is not "what script should I pick?". It is essentially "what country should I pick?"
If you use Traditional Chinese you may cover only 1/10 of the people(Taiwan, Guangdong, HK, some oversea Chinese) of Chinese people if not less.
It's not about traditional or simplified. It's about which first. We are rolling out to all languages world-wide and wanna start with the most relevant ones for getting high reach fast.