The Traditional to Simplified Chinese Converter rewrites Traditional text — as used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau — into the Simplified characters standard in mainland China. Paste a passage and each differing character switches to its Simplified form while shared characters stay put, making it handy for localisation, study, subtitles and cross-strait communication.
When you need this direction
- Publishing mainland editions of content originally written in Taiwan or Hong Kong.
- Subtitling video for mainland Chinese audiences.
- App localisation: Taiwan app stores and mainland app stores often serve the same product with different character sets.
- Research and journalism that cites Traditional Chinese sources for a mainland readership.
How the conversion works
The tool uses an embedded Traditional-to-Simplified mapping table derived from the open-source OpenCC project. It scans your text one character at a time: if the character has a Simplified equivalent in the table it is replaced; if it is already shared by both scripts it is left unchanged. Since the two scripts share the majority of characters, only the few hundred that genuinely differ are substituted. The tool reports exactly how many replacements were made.
The lossy direction: what you should know
Traditional-to-Simplified conversion is directionally lossy in a way that Simplified-to-Traditional is not. Simplified Chinese reform merged several distinct Traditional characters into a single Simplified character. Once merged, the original distinction is gone:
| Traditional (original distinction) | Simplified (merged) | Meaning of each Traditional |
|---|---|---|
| 麵 / 面 → | 面 | noodles / face, surface |
| 髮 / 發 → | 发 | hair / to send, to emit |
| 乾 / 幹 → | 干 | dry / trunk, to do |
| 後 / 后 → | 后 | behind, later / queen, empress |
This converter uses the most common mapping for each character. It will correctly convert 頭髮 (hair) to 头发 and 出發 (to set off) to 出发, because those are the most frequent contexts. However, in a sentence where the rarer meaning applies, the conversion may pick the wrong Simplified character — review the output by context.
Regional vocabulary differences
Character conversion does not adjust mainland vocabulary. A Taiwan term such as 軟體 (software) will be converted character-by-character to 软体 (which in mainland Chinese normally means invertebrate, not software). The mainland word is 软件. After converting the script, proofread for Taiwan-specific vocabulary that has a different mainland equivalent:
| Taiwan usage | Mainland equivalent |
|---|---|
| 軟體 (ruǎntǐ) | 软件 (software) |
| 捷運 (jiéyùn) | 地铁 (metro/subway) |
| 機車 (jīchē) | 摩托车 (motorcycle) |
All processing happens locally in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and the tool works offline once loaded.