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Q: What's the difference between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese?
A: Although there are many spoken forms of Chinese (dialects), there are only two written forms of Chinese. The difference lies in the written appearance of their characters, but the grammatical structure is basically the same:
- Chinese (Trad) - Traditional Chinese:
Traditional Chinese characters are carried over from 3-thousand years of Chinese language history. Some of these characters are extremely complex, composed of more than 25 strokes. These complicated characters require time and effort to learn, and handwriting is slow when compared to Simplified Chinese. Traditional Chinese is used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other overseas Chinese communities.
- Chinese (Simp) - Simplified Chinese:
As its name implies, it is a simplification of Traditional Chinese characters, mainly through the elimination of complex variants and reduction of the number of the strokes that make up a character. It was introduced and promoted in Mainland China since 1949 by the Chinese Government. Today, Simplified Chinese is the official written language in Mainland China and Singapore.
Here's some additional information about the Chinese language and Chinese translations:
Chinese Language and Translation
Chinese is a language (or language family) that forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family of language. Chinese is the second most commonly spoken language in the world, after English. This is mainly because China is the most populous nation in the world. About one-fifth of the people in the world speak some form of Chinese as their native language.
Written Language
The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters which are logograms: each symbol represents a semanteme or morpheme (a meaningful unit of language), as well as one syllable; the written language can thus be termed a morphemo-syllabic script.
There are currently two standards for Chinese characters. One is the traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. The other is the simplified system adopted during the 1950s Chinese Cultural Revolution in Mainland China. The simplified system requires fewer strokes to write certain components and has fewer synonymous characters. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first and only foreign country to recognize and officially adopt the simplified characters.
Spoken Language
In general, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. However, Chinese is also distinguished for a high level of internal diversity. Regional variation between different variants/dialects is comparable in many respects to the Romance language family; many variants of spoken Chinese are different enough to be mutually incomprehensible. There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most populous by far is Mandarin (c. 800 million), followed by Wu (c. 90 million), and Cantonese (c. 80 million).
The standardized form of spoken Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, a member of the Mandarin group. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China or Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore (together with English, Malay, and Tamil). Chineseóde facto, Standard Mandarinóis one of the six official languages of the United Nations (alongside English, Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish). Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese).
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