Simplified vs Traditional Chinese: Differences & Which to Use
Simplified Chinese is used in mainland China and Singapore; Traditional in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau. The history, character differences, and which to choose for localization.
Simplified Chinese is used in mainland China and Singapore; Traditional in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau. The history, character differences, and which to choose for localization.
Simplified and traditional Chinese are two writing systems for the same language — not two different languages. Simplified characters are the standard in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia’s Chinese-language schools; traditional characters are the standard in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. So for most business decisions, the market picks the script for you — the real questions are about language tags, translation workflow, and a few traps we see clients fall into again and again.
We run a web agency in Zhengzhou, and this is the table we hand to every client localizing into Chinese:
| Market | Script | Language tag |
|---|---|---|
| Mainland China | Simplified | zh-Hans (or zh-CN) |
| Singapore & Malaysia | Simplified | zh-Hans-SG |
| Taiwan | Traditional | zh-Hant-TW |
| Hong Kong & Macau | Traditional | zh-Hant-HK |
The zh-Hans and zh-Hant script subtags come from BCP 47, and the W3C recommends them for HTML lang attributes and content negotiation. Use them instead of vague labels like “Chinese (Traditional)” in your CMS.
The split is more recent than most people assume. In January 1956, the PRC State Council issued the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme — 515 simplified characters plus 54 simplified components, rolled out in batches through 1959. The General List of 1964 consolidated the standard to roughly 2,238 simplified characters. A second, more aggressive round in 1977 flopped — people found the new forms ugly — and it was formally withdrawn in 1986. Today’s official reference is the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters, published by the State Council in 2013 with 8,105 characters (official notice).
One caveat on numbers: “how many characters were simplified” depends entirely on which list you count — 515 in the 1956 scheme, about 2,238 on the 1964 list. Any article quoting one hard number without naming the list is being sloppy.
In China, everyone educated since the late 1950s learned simplified only. Traditional characters survive here in calligraphy, temple signage, old shopfront logos, and karaoke subtitles — but nobody handwrites them day to day. Singapore experimented with its own simplified sets in 1969 and 1974 before fully aligning with the PRC standard by 1976, and Malaysia adopted an identical set in 1981 for its Chinese-language schools.
Take 門 (door): eight strokes in traditional, three in simplified 门. Or 愛 (love): thirteen strokes in traditional, ten in simplified 爱, with the 心 “heart” component replaced by 友 “friend”. You’ll see that second one all over the internet as “simplified love has no heart” — the component change is real, but the meaning-loss framing is commentary, not linguistics. Also worth knowing: a large share of everyday characters are identical in both systems. Simplification touched roughly two thousand characters of the standard set, not the whole writing system.
This is the misconception we correct most often. Simplified and traditional are scripts — ways of drawing characters. Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken languages. They’re independent choices, and the American Translators Association explicitly flags “simplified = Mandarin, traditional = Cantonese” as wrong. Two counter-examples kill it: Taiwan speaks Mandarin but writes traditional; Guangdong province speaks Cantonese daily but writes simplified.
Hong Kong deserves its own note. People there speak Cantonese, but formal writing — news, contracts, government documents — is Standard Written Chinese: Mandarin-based grammar rendered in traditional characters. There’s also a separate informal written Cantonese with characters that don’t exist in standard Chinese at all (嘅, 咗), used in ads, tabloids, and chat. So a “traditional Chinese” translation for Hong Kong is not automatically “Cantonese”, and if you want ad copy that sounds street-level HK, you have to ask for written Cantonese specifically.
Partially, yes. Here on the mainland we can read most traditional text, because the simplifications followed systematic patterns and plenty of characters never changed. Research supports this: studies of readers trained in one script show they can process the other, but measurably differently and less fluently (Liu et al., Cognitive Science, 2016). You’ll also see confident claims about which direction is harder — we haven’t found a study that quantifies that, so treat any specific percentage you read as made up.
The practical takeaway: partial readability is not a business strategy. A Taiwanese buyer can decode your simplified product page, slowly, the way you can decode Elizabethan spelling. What it mostly communicates is that you didn’t bother.
Two more lessons from building Chinese-language sites for a living:
One “traditional” translation doesn’t cover both Taiwan and Hong Kong. Character-form standards differ, vocabulary differs, and Hong Kong usage absorbs Cantonese habits — the ATA article above makes the same point. Treat zh-Hant-TW and zh-Hant-HK as separate locales, each reviewed by a native of that market.
Never trust one-click conversion. The mapping between scripts isn’t one-to-one: the single simplified character 发 corresponds to two different traditional characters — 發 (to issue) and 髮 (hair) — and machine converters pick the wrong one constantly. We see “hair” typos on lazily converted sites all the time; it’s the classic tell. Use conversion as a first draft at most, then have a native speaker of the target locale rewrite.
If you remember one thing: match the script to the market, tag it correctly (zh-Hans or zh-Hant plus a region subtag), and put a native reviewer of that specific locale between machine output and publish. That last step is where nearly every bad Chinese site we audit went wrong.
Related reading: China Address Format · Chinese Phone Number Format