Difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese and it’s style of Translation.

30th June 2018.

The article is just for all who can’t differentiate between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese language. As we are very well aware of that Chinese ( Mandarin) is the official language of China, Taiwan, Hong gong & Singapore and nearly 1.2 billion population of the world speaks Chinese ( Mandarin). Just imagine in a country like China people speak Chinese and that their spoken Chinese is even not valid in all over China. It just because they have a different variants i.e. called dialects. In 1945 to 1955 communist party took over China and a great leader, Mao Ze dong had  reformed in original Chinese language in order to simplified the language from traditional and also made a substantial reduction in the total number of standardized Chinese character i.e. today’s known as simplified Chinese (jiǎntǐzì -简体字 ). Simplified Chinese character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional Chinese characters.
After simplification in 1952, there also put a second round of character simplification in 1977, but later it was retracted in 1986, however the Chinese government never officially dropped its goal of further simplification in the future.
There are some differences between simplified and traditional Chinese in order to write traditional Chinese (Taiwanese) and (Cantonese). A native Chinese also can’t write frequently the traditional language due to complexity in writing.
Mandarin is spoken widely spoken by Taiwanese, except for some elderly people who were educated under Japanese rule. In Taipei capital city of taiwan, where there is a high concentration of Mainlanders whose native language is not Taiwanese,
Many persons whoever  emigrated from mainland China after 1949 (12% of the population) mostly speak fluently Mandarin Chinese. Standard Chinese is the official language and is almost universally spoken and understood.

Let us know the exact different in some stages:
1. Writing : Taiwanese use Traditional Chinese characters, but in the mainland China these traditional characters already have been replaced by Simplified/Modern Chinese characters. As far as Honggong is concerned people are still using Traditional Chinese characters, that shows a slightly small number of characters are written differently.
Example:
English: A word spoken can never be taken back
Simplified Chinese: 一言 既 出,马 难 追    Pinyin: yì yán jì chū, sì ma nán zhuī
Traditional Chinese : 一言 既 出,馬 難 追  Pinyin:  yì yán jì chū, sì ma nán zhuī
 
Chinese language is a non-alphabetical language. It is not like others English French & Spanish languages. It is a based on phonetics language i.e known as Pinyin sound.
 
2. Chinese Phonetics:  There is a phonetic system in Chinese language i.e supported by people republic of China ( Pinyin) and Taiwan ( Zhuyin) for teaching the pronunciation of Chinese characters, especially in Mandarin. This system uses 37 special symbols to represent the Mandarin sounds: 21 consonants and 16 rimes, though it also has extensions for Hakka and Taiwanese.
3 Romanization:  In reality, unlike mainland China, Taiwan does not use the Latin alphabet in teaching for  Mandarin pronunciation in Schools. There have been a lot of efforts put by the educational system to initiate a Roman-based system, but these efforts have been seen very slow mainly due to the huge cost expenditure in teacher retraining. Later the central government adopted Tongyong Pinyin as the official romanization in 2002 but local governments are permitted to override the standard as some have adopted Hanyu Pinyin and retained old romanizations that are commonly used. However, in August 2008 the central government announced that Hanyu Pinyin will be the only system of romanization in Taiwan as of January 2009.
 
 
A Chinese translator who wish to translate any text or document into Traditional Chinese, or vice-versa or Traditional Chinese translators who wish to translate any text or document  into Chinese Simplified Chinese, Both of them  should be very much familiar with the written text style of the target language, and also make sure to translate either in traditional or simplified Chinese from any source of languages.
A client may ask Chinese Translator to translate their requirement,  either in English ( Any) to Simplified Chinese or Traditional or Vice-versa. Sometimes many clients do not familiar with the text , so in that case even Translation Agency or a Translator should ask honestly or tell them about difference between Traditional and Simplified.
 
It will be a little bit complicated to take a decision for non-Chinese speaking people.  But we have made a very simple way to understand you and give you  a link to check online through Google Translate

Simplified Chinese – Mainland China & Singapore
Traditional Chinese – Taiwan & Honggong ( Cantonese)
 
Lets take an example of Checking the text by yourself in Google Translate
Step 1:  Keyword Search in Google : Google Translate
Step 2:  Put the source language left hand side ( Either in simplified or traditional)- Dropdown -List
Step 3:  Get the target language right hand side (Either in simplified or traditional)
 

Somu