About Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese

Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese are different variations of the written Chinese language.

Simplified Chinese characters (Simplified Chinese) are standardized Chinese characters used in Mainland, after promoting in the 1960s, they are officially used in mainland China (PRC) and Singapore.

Traditional Chinese characters are currently used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Some of them are highly complex. It is difficult to learn to write them.

Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional Chinese characters.

It is common for Hong Kong people to learn traditional Chinese characters in school, and use some simplified Chinese (either through reading mainland-published books or other media).

For use on computers, however, people tend to type Chinese characters using a traditional character set such as Big5. In Hong Kong, as well as elsewhere, it is common for people who use both sets to do so because it is much easier to convert from the traditional character set to the simplified character set .

Theoretically, at the beginning, they had no difference except for the writing method of the Chinese characters. But, as time went by, great changes have been made.

the rapidly changing world has brought out more and more new words (such as the “Internet”, and “Software”) into our daily life, naturally, these new words may have different local versions in Mainland China, HK, and Taiwan respectively.

For translators who want to translate one language into the other language, they need be familiar with both languages very well. So it is necessary to accumulate the knowledge of language, the more the better.

Now I am trying to remember the style & usage of Traditional Chinese characters. I want to be up on them as soon as possible, so I make a summary of them for a short period of time, here are some examples for your information.

English                                             Simplified Chinese             Traditional Chinese (HK)
Connect                                           连接                                          接駁
Depend on                                      依靠、依赖                             視乎﹡﹡不同/而定
For example：depending on model 視乎型號而定     Depending on the programme 視乎程序的不同
noise                                                 噪声、噪音                            雜聲
sensor                                              传感器                                     感應器
tip                                                      提示、技巧                            小貼士
Communication module          通信模块                                 通訊模組
Regulation                                     规则、规章                             規例
Qualified                                         有资格的                                  合資格的
Soiled                                               污染的                                      骯髒的
Drying                                              烘干                                          乾水
Sub-Menu                                       子菜单                                     子功能表
Buzzer                                              蜂鸣器                                     蜂鳴提示器
View                                                 查看                                         檢視

Read Also: Sieres of chinese people’ view on US’ history