Please read the rest of the comment. I was assuming that what is called "Traditional Chinese" is used in China, based on its name (Chinese) and that GTranslate outputs it. Urdu and Tamil aren't spoken in China and isn't what GTranslate outputs when you select a Chinese language, afaik
Taiwan absolutely does not call itself China. At best the government that holds sovereignty in Taiwan is called the Republic of China, and yet daily everyone calls the country itself "Taiwan," and in fact even the passports were recently changed to say "Taiwan" in enormous letters to remove any confusion about what the people want. The government would change its name to also be Taiwan, or maybe Republic of Taiwan or something like that, but it can't do so without changing the constitution, which Xi Jinping has threatened to invade immediately if this occurs.
So it's both incorrect and disingenuous to say "Taiwan calls itself China."
> “We don’t have a need to declare ourselves an independent state,” Tsai told the BBC. “We are an independent country already and we call ourselves the Republic of China, Taiwan.”[0]
So it's not factually incorrect. Of course the issue is fraught and just saying "the country on Formosa is called the Republic of China" would be completely deceptive, but nobody is doing that.
Talk about Chinese politics is always heated but I don't appreciate being accused of being disingenuous.
"Republic of China" is a dramatically different name than "China." To claim that both the PRC and Taiwan call themselves the same name is to muddy the waters and contribute to the PRC's cultural imperialism through linguistic mechanism.
Furthermore, though Tsai Ing-Wen is the president of the RoC, as I said, there's a rising independence movement separate from the settler-colonial government of the RoC. Among these people, and the majority of Taiwanese, Taiwan is "Taiwan," and "RoC" is at best a formality, at worse an unchosen government underwritten by an unchangeable constitution.
If you're unintentionally muddying the waters that's one thing, but I react strongly because I strongly oppose anybody that assists the PRC's cultural imperialism.
What do people living in Taiwan call the 'other' China? Is "mainland China" a correct thing to say, or is the word "main" there implying that Taiwan is lesser and not an equal/peer state?
I used the word China in other comments because I didn't know what to call it otherwise, hoping that in the context of Taiwan it is clear what I mean
They call it 中國 "Middle Country," or "Middle State" or "Middle Kingdom," (bear in mind that the meaning 國 "guo" has changed over time) the name for the territory and empires encompassing basically the current territory of the PRC since the Western Zhou dynasty.
Under no circumstances is Taiwan every seriously referred to as "China," not even "Republic of China," the official name in the constitution, is really used anymore. The passports now prominently say "Taiwan," and polling indicates that "Chinese" identity in Taiwan is dying swiftly with the settler colonialist KMT.
The sibling comment may be referring to political discussions between politicians, especially when talking with PRC officials. I'm not sure, I've almost never heard those terms used except by really weird super-KMT taxi drivers.
The parent comment that "Taiwan calls itself China" is simply incorrect, and the government mentioned, in the 70s, was a KMT totalitarian government that's been essentially overthrown as of the 90s.
It's a pointed issue that you'll often find heated responses from because Taiwan, for basically the first time in its history as a globally participant nation, is finally getting to establish its own identity, separate from the Dutch, the Qing, the Japanese, and the ROC/KMT settler-colonialists. There's great fear that the CPC, having failed to win a culture war here with han chauvinism / han supremacy, will simply resort to violence to imperialise the nation.
"Mainland" means "continental" in general; the other context it comes up in is "mainland Europe". The term is ... not completely uncontentious in its own right, but mostly on the "assumes the other China is another China" dimension.
I'm not sure what the last part means about the other China being another China, but continental sounds like a good alternative actually. No concept of main versus spare/alternate/lesser, just not an island
Yes, but the island of Hainan is considered part of "Mainland China," while the mainland areas of Hong Kong and Macau are not, so in this context it's a purely political term, trying to shape reality as opposed to just describing it.
It is not. Traditional Chinese is not used in mainland china. It was superceded by simplified Chinese in areas controlled by the Chinese communist party.
This is a rather basic piece of knowledge when discussing Taiwan and Chinese relations.
... The exact point being that Taiwan by and large does not use simplified Chinese. They are different countries. They speak effectively different languages.
effectively different languages? no, both the mainland and Taiwan both speak Mandarin, although with distinctive slang and accents. I grew up learning simplified and I can guess a lot of traditional characters reasonably well, although I hear going from traditional -> simplified is much harder
They speak the same language in China and Taiwan: Mandarin Chinese. The question is whether to use more Taiwanese-sounding phrases when traditional characters are requested.
A very similar (just more technical/less known) point that's pretty close would be enforcing Sanskritised Hindi written in devanagari on anyone trying to use Persian-influenced words or Urdu. (Or vice versa.)
This seems purely political and obviously divisive: Taiwan (& HK) has its own history and China doesn't want it to.
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Taiwan is its own country. India has a similar population to China. Why not just translate into Urdu or Tamil instead, by that logic?