Simplified or Traditional Chinese

Simplified Vs Traditional Chinese

Chinese characters were simplified after the Communist Party took over in 1949 in mainland China in an effort to increase the literacy level of the working class. This means the overall shape of a character was maintained while the number of strokes inside the character was reduced. For example, the character for horse 馬 became 马  after simplification. The four legs have been fused into a horizontal stroke, and the mane has disappeared. 

However Chinese living in Hong Kong and Taiwan continued to use the existing Chinese characters, which is named Traditional Chinese characters, to differentiate the two. Therefore Simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China and Singapore, while Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Even though the traditional form is used in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, their spoken languages are different, with Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong and Mandarin spoken in Taiwan. Some people think Traditional Chinese is equivalent to Cantonese. This is a misunderstanding. Traditional and Simplified Chinese are only referring to the written form, not the spoken form. 

The differences lie beyond the scripts.  Influences from other dialects and foreign languages have caused the Chinese language to evolve over time differently in different countries. For example, ‘wet market’ is translated as 巴刹（pronounced as basha） in Singapore, but as 菜市场（pronounced as caishichang） in China, as the Singaporean version of Chinese has been heavily influenced by Malay and Chinese dialects such as Hokkien.

The same can be said about Traditional Chinese for Taiwan and Hong Kong. Simply converting the script does not achieve full localization. Therefore it is always preferable to have a person who has lived in that part of the world to be the translator or checker to perform language localization.

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