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Would your business benefit from access to China’s 1.4 billion citizens? Are you planning on branching out and promoting your goods and services there? If so, there’s plenty that you need to know, from the quirks of Chinese corporate culture to which forms of Chinese language to use.
As an experienced language service provider that has been undertaking professional Chinese translation for well over a decade, Tomedes is well placed to bring you up to speed on relevant language matters. Do you understand Chinese? No? Not a problem! We are here to take care of that for you, with Chinese translators and interpreters on hand to meet your every need.
Even if you don’t speak Chinese, and have no plans to learn, it can still be interesting to discover more about the languages of China. That’s where this article comes in! We’ve taken a look at traditional vs simplified Chinese, explaining what they are, why and how they differ and which you need to use for your Chinese translations. If you’re not sure yet whether you need traditional or simplified Chinese, don’t worry – you will be they the time you finish reading this!
What Exactly Are Traditional and Simplified Chinese?
What is the difference between simplified and traditional Chinese? Good question! We’ll explore what each of the forms of the language entails below. For the moment, suffice it to say that, as the name implies, simplified Chinese is a simpler version of traditional Chinese.
Let’s take a look at the two different types of Chinese languages.
What Is Traditional Chinese?
‘Traditional Chinese’ is actually retronym, as up until the 1950s, it was simply ‘Chinese.’ However, the creation of a simplified version of the written language at that time required the introduction of a means of differentiation, hence the ‘traditional’ being added.
The ‘traditional’ Chinese characters are those that have been in use for the written form of the language since clerical script emerged during the Han dynasty. They have changed little since the 5th century. (For a deeper look into the world’s oldest languages, you can click the link below.)
Traditional Chinese is officially used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in China. Its characters are referred to in various ways by Chinese speakers, including ‘standard characters,’ ‘orthodox characters,’ ‘complex characters’ and ‘full Chinese characters.’
Read more: What are the world's oldest languages?
What Is Simplified Chinese?
Simplified Chinese is exactly that – a simplified version of traditional Chinese characters. The government of the People's Republic of China on Mainland China introduced this character set in the 1950s. Today, it is used in China, Malaysia and Singapore. Quite simply, many characters have fewer strokes than they used to, making them easier to learn. Some of those that were already fairly simple were left unchanged.
The introduction of simplified Chinese provided language learners not only with characters that were easier to write, but with significantly fewer of them in total. If, for example, traditional Chinese contained two or more words with the same pronunciation but with different meanings (think ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’ for an English example of this), the simplified version would use a single character for all of the words, rather than one for each (as was the case with traditional Chinese).
Interestingly, the Chinese government remains officially committed to further simplification of the language. As part of this, a second set of simplifications was launched in 1977. However, the resulting confusion and unpopularity of the new simplifications saw the government eventually withdraw them, nearly a decade later.
The History of Simplified Chinese
It’s important to understand the whole Chinese traditional vs simplified discussion, so let’s take a moment to explore precisely why there are two types of Chinese language when it comes to the written form.
Why is there simplified and traditional Chinese? Largely because literary levels in China used to be incredibly low. When the communists