Creative Commons is doubly excited to announce the publication of two official Chinese language translations of version 4.0 of our license suite: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. These translations will enable approximately 1.2 billion persons (more than 15% of the world’s population) to understand our licenses in their first language. We could not be more pleased to see this effort reach a successful conclusion after more than five years of collaboration among experts and communities.

A screenshot of the CC BY traditional and simplified Chinese translations. Licensed CC BY

Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese are different in important respects, but also have many similarities and overlapping communities. Even within each language, variances occur depending on region and cultures. While all official translations are faithful linguistic translations of the original English language 4.0 licenses, CC and its community account for these variations and document the rationale for those differences on our website.

Uniquely, this effort spanned volunteer legal experts and community members across the following jurisdictions: China Mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Chunyan Wang led our efforts on the Simplified Chinese translation, and Tyng-Ruey Chuang led our efforts on the Traditional Chinese translation. They were assisted by a large group of volunteers, to whom CC extends its profound thanks, including the following individuals:

Xingzhi Xin
Yi Zheng
Beibei Sun
Ben Cheng
Li Yahong
Ying Chan
Benjamin Chow
Haggen So
Lucien C.H. Lin
Yi-Hsuan Lin
Shun-Ling Chen
Ally Wang

This accomplishment is a testimony to the strength of our community and our shared vision for supporting the growth of the global commons. A special thanks to the Ford Foundation for a grant through their Global Travel and Learning Fund to support a meeting of the 4.0 translation teams in 2015 and 2016, and to the Wikimedia Foundation for supporting the teams’ translations efforts in 2016.

Congratulations!