繁體 & 简体

Agree too.

Philip Peng said:

Leo Wee Fah said:

Spending money for "redundancy" is not wise on our part

Hi, Leo,

Buying them with Base Package bundle already gave you about 90% discount from its original price.  If you can consider buy the Traditional Chinese and get the Simplified Chinese for FREE or vice versa, it might make you feel a bit better.  If you don't want to buy the "redundancy" copy, you are always welcome to buy it as stand-alone copy, but that will cost you more to just get the traditional Chinese or simplified Chinese alone than buy them as base package bundle.  Sorry, but this is how it will be before we have enough resources to make them separate base packages.  I hope this will make you feel better.

Best regards,

Philip

I think Traditional and Simplified Chinese is closed enough to consider them not as 2 separate translations (i.e. independent license) but 1 single translation in 2 variants (i.e. single license covering both.)

In the very beginning of Logos entering Chinese market when they offered Chinese Bibles, it is quite ridiculous (sorry if that sounds too strong but can’t think of a better adjective for this situation, may be funny?) that the 上帝 version is in Traditional Chinese only and the 神 version is in Simplified Chinese only.

Also, paying twice for the difference between 上帝 and 神 versions also doesn’t make sense. Because literally one could search all 上帝 and replace by 神 to get the 神 version. That’s their only difference.

So in my situation, I bought the traditional Chinese version, which was 上帝 version only, while I really need to use 神 version. I figured it is easier for me to replace 上帝 by 神 mentally then to replace every simplified Chinese characters with traditional ones if I bought the other.

So to conclude,

• please consider regarding Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese version as 1 single license, pay once own both. (And provide existing customer who own a traditional version to obtain the simplified version for free if they want to. e.g. via bundle and dynamic pricing.) I know sometimes there are resources really are translated by different translators in the 2 versions. Exclude these in this argument.
• please consider regarding 上帝 and 神 version of the Chinese bibles (such as CUV) as 1 single license. Similar as above.
• (I haven’t mentioned this above) consider using automated tool such as OpenCC with permissive Apache 2 license. Consider wikipedia as an example: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/西雅圖橋樑列表 (just random example), there’s a conversion button in the top left corner to switch between Traditional/Simplified Chinese (, or even variants between them which is irrelevant here.) For resources that only one such translation exists, automated tool can be used to switch (with a caveat mentioned that this is automated.)
• (not mentioned again) provide user a switch to choose between Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese (or both) and only those are downloaded, to save disk space because often time they don’t need both (except when they need to serve both audiences.)

Lee said:

Indeed Traditional and Simplified Chinese describes not language per se but the script. You could liken it to American and British spelling differences, although in the case of Chinese these differences are much more frequent.

For almost all the resources, the actual language variation between Traditional and Simplified Chinese is basically nil. It only boils down to script (akin to spelling) and punctuation.

The staff has mentioned sometimes they are translated by different translators. Don't know if this is the majority of the resources or not.

This is also not true in general. Translation between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese are far more complicated than that. If you want a professional result (where all for fee resources should be), you need to hire a professional translator to perform that job. They are not translating the characters per se, but how the Chinese language is used. That's why if you go to a Chinese wiki there are buttons like Hong Kong Traditional, Taiwan traditional, etc. e.g. 單車 vs 自行車. I typed both of them in Traditional Chinese but the later term is the one should be used in Simplified Chinese.

That said, many Chinese Christian Books are just "translated" by the characters, not by a real translator. In those cases (even in the cases that one would replace 單車 by 自行車, like Chinese Wikipedia does), a computer program is good enough, and I guess that's how most of them has been done. (Like one Christian wrote in Traditional Chinese, and the publisher "translates" it to Simplified Chinese to serve the Mainland market.)

Lee said:

This is a weaker case. Different terms for divinity are used, and quite possibly there are different licenses or license holders.

Do you know who are the license holders? You should also read into a little bit of history how come CUV comes in 2 variants, differ by only how God should be translated vs. god(s). (The reason in nowadays standards is quite silly.)

Philip Peng said:

Thank you for your commends.  Most of the publishers we work with own both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese copyrights of the same book.  We have to sell them as two separate books because they are two different copyrights.  Sometimes we get both copyrights and sometimes we only get either traditional or simplified Chinese rights.  We cannot "use single license covering both" like you mentioned it before as we need to follow the agreements with the publishers.  I hope you understand.  Thanks.

Yes, I heard that before so that's why I mentioned somewhere that this should be part of the negotiation. This kind of perception should be passed to them to know. I know Logos don't have much negotiation power there, but I think what Logos should do is to pass our perception to them, not the other way around.

And therefore I've some suggestions to Logos: self-publish, like Lexham. Right now the difficulty in entering the Chinese market are tied by the publishers that most but one want to work with you, in their own terms. So you can turn this around by publishing your own Chinese work, say, under the Lexham brand. Translate the Faithlife Study Bible, add the reverse interlinear to Faithlife's CUV (and fix the punctuation there!), and then find one good commentary series that hasn't been translated into Chinese yet (say something similar to Tyndale commentary.) Starting from these to attract Chinese Christians to buy into the system. Now you have a lot of users and bargaining power to negotiate with other publishers. (Better yet, made FSB free like the English one, translate your own Chinese Bible like the LEB; then dict., etc. Give them away free. There's no single Chinese don't like free stuffs.)

Or, did you guys considered buying Almega? I know their software is not worth buying, but the resources published through it might.

I know I made it sounds very simple but it's just a start. Food for thought. Hope that you guys can come up with a good plan to penetrate the Chinese market.

God bless and godspeed.

Hi, Philip,

I've an idea. I knew an old brother who created a database of Chinese reverse interlinear information that could be resulted in 1) CUV reverse interlinear 2) Hebrew/Greek-Chinese interlinear. A problem he has is that he spent a small fortune in creating a Bible software to give that away for free, with no success.

I wonder if there's some sort of deal that can be made such that Faithlife/Logos can take such a dataset and produce Logos Edition resources for it, with the condition that it is "sold" as free? (I would still need to convince him as I can't say for him.)

In return Faithlife has some Chinese resources that can be given away for free as promoting its brand in the Chinese market. It could be a win-win. This brother I referred to is also kind of well-known among some Chinese Christian circles.

You could email me if you found this remotely plausible and worth discussing further.

Bless,

Kolen

[:)]

We are talking about 2 different Bibles here and the other one from 北美基督徒中心 is a Chinese translation translated by 張伯琦. Both of them comes with a concordance and a Chinese Bible with Strong's numbers. The concordance by 張伯琦 is unique and quite good in Chinese standard.

Our Church in Hong Kong was the one originally published Watchman Nee's 倪柝聲全集. Note that this differs from 倪柝聲文集 produced in Taiwan, where the publisher might be quite difficult to work with (however I'm amazed you guys has a deal with them to produce the recovery version, currently in pre-pub.) However, our church sold their copyright of 倪柝聲全集 to another publisher in Hong Kong. I don't know them directly, but "I know a guy who know a guy who know a guy..." I can try to connect with them if you want. I guess it will be a very good collection to be included in like the Bronze base package since his work is very influential among Chinese Christians.

If you guys are interested in producing works from 陳希曾、江守道, etc., I could try to connect with them too. Their works are also quite influential, especially in Chinese Christian in America.

One question I have is if Logos still sell collections by disc, like the Libronix disc from the old days? I ask so because I can imagine they would like to be able to sell the discs in our conference or the bookstore in our churches, like physically.

Philip Peng said:

We did work with the 台灣福音書房 to obtain the recovery version Bible and 倪柝聲全集。  We have not produced all the books from 倪柝聲全集 yet, only some of his titles are now available in Logos.

The one from 台灣福音書房 should be 倪柝聲文集. (I know, it's confusing for historical reasons.)

Sadly, it seems the progress is slow. The Recovery version doesn't seem to gather much interests. Have you try to ask them to promote this in their Church directly? It is uncommon to obtain the Recovery Version (both Chinese and English) in digital form (they used to sell their own "PDA" kind of thing just for reading their Bibles and books.) And then the majority of people who reads the Recovery version is really those from the "Local Churches". So promoting from within their church and ask them to create a Faithlife account to pre-order would makes the "progress bar" grow much faster. Alternatively, you guys might just skip the whole pre-pub process for this particular Bible. I am quite confident many brothers and sisters from their church would sign up and buy just for that resources. If you feel like it you can even create an app like the "Faithlife Study Bible", partnered with their Living Stream Ministry, for the recovery versions and their resources (e.g. 生命讀經.)

P.S. I'm not from local churches but have met with them briefly on campus. Also, the conferences I referred to are in west coast of the US. It would be a hard sell to let them set a Logos booth though if the majority of Logos' Chinese offering doesn't include their works (like 陳希曾/江守道）

Kolen is very correct that the two different version cannot be simply translated character by character.  I preach in both Mandarin and Cantonese, and if there were two versions, I would be paying for two licences to prepare my sermons.  I appreciate the convenience of having both versions in one licence.