Traditional and Simplified Chinese in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan

A month or so back, I received an email from a reader on the other tech blog (which I rarely update):

Hello, your site is very useful for web masters, but the translate button of the right side has something wrong. The fourth flag is "Chinese (simplified)", not "Chinese (traditional)". Please correct it. Thanks you very much!!

Reference site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Strait_relations

Interesting observation. In both sites I use a plugin called "Global Translator" which creates a translated version of your webpage into a large selection of languages using various online translation engines. I strongly recommend you give it a try. Anyways, the plugin shows the language  through national flags, which is – ofcourse – problematic (why is English the American flag?).   In one of the latest versions the plugin incorporated both Chinese Traditional and Chinese Simplified and put them both under the national flag of China. Which is, I believe, what this reader is referring to.

A few months back I might have agreed there is a serious problem here, but since now I’m in Hong Kong I  could give the following answer :

It is my understanding that Traditional Chinese is used in HK and that HK is now a part of China (SAR). But it’s an interesting point. Thanks for bringing that up.

Still, the guy’s got a point. The Hong Kong flag is still not that same as the Chinese flag, is it?

I wonder if the Chinese ever considered transforming Hong Kong to the mainland Simplified Chinese. From the few Hong Kong students I talked to, they don’t really seem to care.