Big5 The industrial standard character set used in Taiwan and Hong Kong that encodes traditional Chinese characters. It has about 13,000 characters. character set A way of representing the writing system of a language on a computer. Computers only understand numbers, so a character set establishes a standard mapping between numbers and the glyphs of a language. A one-byte set has space for 256 characters which is sufficient for English and many Western languages, but East Asian languages such as Chinese need two-bytes to encode their thousands of characters. Chinese environment The software that enables the viewing and typing of Chinese on a computer. This can be done through the operating system or through an add-on product like Apple's Chinese Language Kit or TwinBridge's Chinese Partner for Microsoft Windows. CJK A commonly used acronym for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The problems encountered in localizing software are similar for all three languages. double-byte An encoding that uses two-bytes, as opposed to the one-byte encodings used by most Western languages. GB, GuoBiao The character set used in the People's Republic of China, Singapore, and other places that use simplified Chinese characters. It has about 7,000 simplified Chinese characters. GBK An expansion (the K stands for "kuozhan" or expansion) of the GB character set to include traditional characters and other characters in the Unicode character set. hanzi The way that Chinese characters are referred to in Chinese, like kanji for Japanese or hanja for Korean. input method A way of entering Chinese characters into a program. This includes ways to use a Western QWERTY keyboard to input the thousands of possible Chinese characters, speech recognition, and handwriting recognition. pinyin The standard way of romanizing Mandarin Chinese in the People's Republic of China and in most other places around the world. Unicode A relatively new character set that aims to include all the major languages of the world, including Chinese. It includes both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, along with the dictionary radicals, pinyin tones, and many other useful additions for Chinese. Many new operating systems and programs now use Unicode.