Typing in 中文
November 22, 2009 – 2:32 am如果你看这份 http://planet.fedora-zh.org, 对不起我的中文不足够的翻译。 我会尝试写中文时，我可以。
(For those reading on the Chinese planet, I am sorry my Chinese is not good enough to translate this post. I will try to write in Chinese when I can.)
For those reading on the English-language Planet Fedora, I’m trying to learn how to participate in the Chinese-language Fedora community, and chronicling my adventures (as usual) as I go along.
Kin Chew posted instructions on how to enable Chinese character input in Fedora 11 – I should screencast an F12 version now that the new release is out. But thanks to Kin Chew’s instructions, I’ve finally started typing in Chinese – less than 5 minutes from beginning to read his post to typing 谢谢 (thank you) in a comment, including the reboot. My prior adventures in that language have all involved either dead trees or individual copy-pasting of characters from online dictionaries. Yes, it’s painful; that’s why my prior online output in Chinese probably numbers less than 100 characters.
Ah, the power of documentation. See, it’s not that this was hard – but prior to Kin Chew’s post, Chinese input was (1) something I didn’t need to do, and was interested enough to maybe spend 10 minutes trying to figure out, and (2) something that took me more than 10 minutes to figure out, and therefore something that I didn’t do. And I keep reminding myself that this is what it feels like for new people looking at joining the projects that I care about.
Next steps: figuring out how to make Chinese characters display correctly in GNOME Terminal and Konsole so I can see #fedora-zh without having to fire up xchat separately (I use irssi and screen for IRC), then figuring out how to tweak and run lingobot so I can understand #fedora-zh without having to pile through my dictionary all the time. I have a grasp of enough basic grammar that a word-for-word translation should enable me to begin squeaking by – vocabulary is my main deficiency at the moment.
One Response to “Typing in 中文”
Mel, for translations you may want to try the stardict and stardict-dic-* packages.
When you have the “Scan” checkbox ticked, stardict pops up a tooltip like bubble that translates the text currently selected. The quality of the Chinese to English dictionary may be a bit “uneven” though.
gnome-terminal can display most of Unicode including CJKV just fine out of the box.
The text just has to be in the utf-8 encoding.
I don’t know what encoding #fedora-zh uses but I know for sure there is a way to configure irssi + screen to convert all the east Asian encodings out there and them work in gnome-terminal.
By Scott Tsai on Nov 22, 2009