Why Wandering Off Topic and Doing This?

Originally, the "Realistic Taiwan and China Relations" mod was not meant to be a Chinese localization correction mod outside of the basic terminologies around the concept of Republic of China vs. an independent Taiwanese state. However, a year after 0.4.x vanilla game version has been rolled out, the atrocious Chinese localization is getting very hard to overlook, especially since this mod is catering to the Chinese speaking audiences in both China and Taiwan. Also I discovered that this mod only overlaps with one Chinese localization file (TINationTemplate.chs) in the most popular 0.4.x Chinese localization correction mod on steam workshop, which means the amount of mod conflicts are rather small for those who want to create a proper merge file in the future.

Credits

First of all, the main credit must be given to Joseph.C and his [0.4.55]汉化重置 mod, which provided the first draft of Chinese localization strings for me to review, plus a clearer understanding on how the game code logic reads nation names in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Also a huge thanks to the Chinese Wikipedia editors that provided a convenient lookup table on how countries around the world are being remembered in both China (Simplified Chinese) and Taiwan (Traditional Chinese).

Change Scope and Challenges

Unlike other comprehensive Chinese localization correction mods, the "Realistic Taiwan and China Relations" mod only corrects the Chinese localization files around country names (TINationTemplate.chs). However, unlike the other mods, this mod corrects the Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) localization strings (TINationTemplate.cht) as well.

To a lay person, the exercise on doing localization between Simplified and Traditional Chinese seems straight forward - after all, just create the Chinese string with one character set, then do one to one mapping with the other character set to finish the job. However, one must remember that China (Simplified Chinese) and Taiwan/Republic of China (Traditional Chinese) have been separated culturally since 1949 due to the Cold War, hence their expression of country names have been molded by their respective political ideology for over 70 years. A neutral country name for one side (e.g. usage of the word "Joseon" to describe Korea) will sound strange, if not rude to the other. To add on top of that, Chinese is not my first language. It is hoped that by typing out notes like this, other readers can understand where the logic behind this localization effort is coming from and offer appropriate feedback where applicable.

Localization Approach

There are three basic rules I follow when doing this localization, outside of the contents from "Realistic Taiwan and China Relations" mod:

• Follow the English strings and developer's intention as closely as possible. If the developer picked a particular English terminology to describe a country, then I will try to find the exact matching term in both Chinese and Taiwanese culture unless it is impossible.
  
• Make sure the Chinese string describes the nations as proper countries.
  
• Make the Chinese strings as short as possible. E.g. use shorthand and avoid adding qualifiers such as "the Republic of" unless it is necessary.

High Level Change Notes

Given that there are over 1000 changes in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese localization files, describing each one of them is not possible. However, the following sections will provide a high level change descriptions.

• Fix Obvious Mistakes
  
  
  • Aside from obvious spelling mistakes, ALL national adjective strings in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese localization files are malformed. I corrected all of them based on blueprint provided by Joseph.C's mod.
  
  
• Formatting Changes
  
  
  • Removed the blank spaces around the dashes, as in the names for nations composed of several countries will display as "AAA-BBB" instead of "AAA - BBB". Idea credited to Joseph.C's mod.
  
  
• Matching English Terms
  
  
  • Made a clear distinction between "English" and "British" for GBR nation.
    
  • Made clear distinctions between "Federation", "Confederation" and "Alliances" in country names. In vanilla game the Chinese localization just use the word "Federation" for everything.
    
  • Breakaway countries located in China Proper now use terms that match the English strings.
  
  
• Legitimize Countries
  
  
  • Corrected several country names that some how got the word "province" or "state" attached to them for no reason, which made it sound like they can never become real countries in game even after independence.
  
  
• Make the Names Short
  
  
  • North Korea and South Korea now use the shorthand for their in game country names.
  
  
• Contentious Cultural/Political Stuff
  
  
  • Your mileage may vary for the below changes since it is dealing with hypothetical geopolitical scenarios:
    
    • If North Korea manages to unify the Korean Peninsula, the Traditional Chinese localization file will start calling the Korean people as the "people of Joseon" instead of the "people of the Han State". Although Taiwan/Republic of China does not recognize the North Korean government as a legitimate representative over the Korean people, along with their fondness for the term "Joseon", if North Korea really did manages to unify the Korean Peninsula and destroys the South Korean government (a.k.a the Han State), I guess Taiwan/Republic of China will just to have suck it up.
      
    • If the Republic of China migrated to mainland China using the "Liberating Mainland China" tech, the Chinese localization files will start calling its subjects "Chinese" without any qualifier. Given that "Liberating Mainland China" concept is strongly associated with the sino-centric Republic of China that existed before the 1990s, and "Republican Chinese" is not a term widely used in English during WWII to describe a citizen of the Republic of China, I believe this use of shorthand is appropriate here.

Final Note

This country name localization effort is a massive project and prone to unintended mistakes and offenses. If you see something that needs correction, you are free to submit a suggestion in this thread.