Change language to chinese (XeLaTeX, memoir, polyglossia)

Question

I am writing a document, which is to be available in english, danish, german and chinese (so far). Changing between the first three languages is easily achieved; by substituting the desired language in the following two commands

\documentclass[english]{memoir}

and

\setdefaultlanguage{english}

references (tables, figures, ...), captions and headings (table of contents, bibliography, ...) are displayed in the correct language (I am using cleveref for references if that matters). Now the question is what to do to achieve the same result with chinese?

Note, this question is not about how to type chinese in LaTeX, but about how to get the auto generated "text bits" translated into chinese. In addition, since I am using a great deal of the memoir functionality, changing the document class to ctexart is not an option.

Is there any pretty solution available - or do a have to redefine the macros myself?

Answer 1

Since it is not a Chinese document, I think xeCJK should be your first choice to support typesetting Chinese characters. Say,

\usepackage{xeCJK}
\setCJKmainfont{some Chinese font you use}
% ...

However, there is no babel/polyglossia equivalent for Chinese. Roughly speaking, I think it is better to define a set of macros yourself.

It won't be difficult for most cases. A simple definition could be, for example:

\newcommand\chineselanguage{%
  \renewcommand\contentsname{目录}%
  \renewcommand\listfigurename{插图}%
  \renewcommand\listtablename{表格}%
  \renewcommand\indexname{索引}%
  \renewcommand\bibname{参考文献}%
  \renewcommand\figurename{图}%
  \renewcommand\tablename{表}%
}

For numders and date, zhnumber package provides some macros to get Chinese numbers, digits and date.