Update on the Revisions of the English version of Taiwan's 400 Year History

I'm just about done with most of the major revisions to Su Beng's English version of TAIWAN'S 400 YEAR HISTORY. In doing the revisions, I have tried not to change the perspective on Taiwan's history that Su Beng offers in the book. My focus has been on copyediting the text, updating certain key facts like the current population of Taiwan, dealing with inconsistencies in the pinyin and romanization of Chinese and Taiwanese terms used (which has meant including the Chinese characters for some of the names of people and places so that there is no ambiguity or confusion), and giving an explanation of certain Taiwanese or Chinese colloquial terms mentioned in the text. For some of the sections of the book that needed more clarification, I've referred to the Chinese language version of Su Beng's book THE TAIWANESE PEOPLE'S 400 YEARS OF HISTORY (台灣人四百年史）and with the translation assistance of my parents, and I've cited additional information from the Chinese language version in TAIWAN'S 400 YEAR HISTORY.

Since the book was published in 1986, there have certainly been a number of developments, which would require the addition of several chapters to the book. Unfortunately that would require work that is outside of the scope of this revision. However, at the end of the book there is a timeline of major events in the history of Taiwan, which ends in 1986 and for this revision I've decided to work on extending that timeline until early 2015.

At this time I am also dealing with some formatting and layout issues for the book that have come up as a result of this revision. 

Next will be the conversion of the book into an ebook format. 

This revision will be far from perfect, but hopefully it can be the first of a series of periodic revisions of the book in the future. 

It is also my hope that one day there will be a more complete translation of the Chinese language version Su Beng's book which is 2000 plus pages long. At 150 plus pages, the current English language book, TAIWAN'S 400 YEAR HISTORY is only a fraction of length of the more comprehensive Chinese language version.