Traditional Chinese Characters

Traditional Chinese characters: Traditional Chinese medicine.

Traditional Chinese, a form of Chinese character font, known in Europe and the United States as "Traditional Chinese", generally refers to the Chinese character simplification movement replaced by simplified characters.

Sometimes it also refers to the entire regular and clerical writing system of Chinese characters before the simplification movement. Traditional Chinese has a history of more than 2,000 years, and until 1956 was the standard character for Chinese commonly used among Chinese people everywhere.

Traditional Chinese characters are still used in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, in Singapore and in overseas Chinese communities such as Malaysia, where both traditional and simplified Chinese characters coexist, and in mainland China, where they are retained or used for cultural relics and monuments, family name variations, calligraphy and seal-engraving, handwritten inscriptions, and special needs.

In January 2001, the People's Republic of China General Language and Writing System Law came into effect, specifying the implementation of standardized Chinese characters in China, as well as the scope of traditional Chinese characters.

The General Standardized Chinese Character Table (GSCCT) was published on June 5, 2013 with a schedule of standardized Chinese characters in comparison with traditional and variant characters, and the standardized Chinese character table prevails for the use of Chinese characters in the general field of application.

Traditional and Simplified Conversions

The Simplified and Traditional Conversions (STC) function in Microsoft Word, Excel, and Google Translate use Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese as the target language. The conversion quality of Microsoft Word is relatively good, with many revisions.

However, a lot of revisions can still be found in the conversion results, which are not in line with the expression habits of the target language, while the revisions in Google Translate are only limited to word-level revisions, such as "头发" and "发现" in Simplified Chinese, but in Traditional Chinese, these two characters are a single word, and in Traditional Chinese, these two characters are a single word. For example, in Simplified Chinese, "头发" and "发现" are one word, but in Traditional Chinese, they are not the same, and Google has made appropriate revisions in most of these cases.