Simplified to Traditional Chinese Converter (Both Directions)
Convert Simplified to Traditional Chinese (and back) instantly. Honest about one-to-many mappings like 发→發/髮 and regional vocabulary differences the tool cannot fix.
Convert Simplified to Traditional Chinese (and back) instantly. Honest about one-to-many mappings like 发→發/髮 and regional vocabulary differences the tool cannot fix.
Convert between Simplified and Traditional Chinese instantly, both directions. Based on 1,314 standard character mappings, running locally in your browser.
Simplified and traditional Chinese are not two languages. They are two ways of writing the same one, and the split is recent. In 1956 the State Council of the People’s Republic of China promulgated the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme, which reduced the stroke count of hundreds of common characters. The 1964 General List of Simplified Characters, reissued in 1986, fixed the set at 2,235 characters. Mainland China and later Singapore adopted it; Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau never did, and continue writing the traditional forms that predate the reform. Source: Wikipedia: Simplified Chinese characters.
Converting traditional to simplified is nearly mechanical. Going the other way is not, because the reform sometimes merged several traditional characters into one simplified form. The classic case is 发: in traditional text it splits into 發 (to send, to develop, as in 發展) and 髮 (hair, as in 頭髮). Write 頭發 and every native reader in Taipei will wince.
| Simplified | Traditional options | How they differ |
|---|---|---|
| 发 | 發 / 髮 | 發展 (develop) vs 頭髮 (hair) |
| 干 | 乾 / 幹 / 干 | 乾燥 (dry) vs 幹活 (work) vs 干涉 (interfere) |
| 后 | 後 / 后 | 後面 (behind) vs 皇后 (empress) |
| 面 | 面 / 麵 | 面對 (face) vs 麵條 (noodles) |
Even a perfect character-level conversion can still read as obviously mainland. Decades of separate development mean the regions often use entirely different words for the same thing, especially in technology.
| English | Mainland (Simplified) | Taiwan (Traditional) |
|---|---|---|
| Software | 软件 | 軟體 |
| Network / internet | 网络 | 網路 |
| Printer | 打印机 | 印表機 |
| Computer mouse | 鼠标 | 滑鼠 |
The choice is geographic, not stylistic. Use simplified for mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia. Use traditional for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, and note that Taiwan and Hong Kong themselves diverge on some character preferences (Taiwan writes 裡, Hong Kong 裏). Overseas communities are mixed: older diaspora media leaned traditional, while newer mainland-origin communities read simplified. If you localize a website, serve both versions rather than picking one, and tag each with the correct hreflang annotation (zh-Hans and zh-Hant) so search engines route each reader to the right script.
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