When clients are seeking translation services from English to Chinese, a question will often be asked, that is, whether they want the target language be Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese. And that’s when clients get confused. What? Are there different Chinese languages? The answer is, when it comes to written Chinese, there are two forms currently used in the world, one is called Simplified Chinese, which is used mostly in mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore, and the other one is Traditional Chinese, which is used in Taiwan. So, depending on where your audience of the translated documents are located, you can choose either Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese.

Simplified Chinese is the result of character reform by the government of the People’s Republic of China since 1950. The Simplified Chinese characters are mostly kept in the same pronunciations as their Traditional Chinese counterparts, the many Simplified Chinese characters have less strokes than their Traditional Chinese counterparts, for example, the word “China” in simplified Chinese is “中国”, while in Traditional Chinese, is “中國”， and the word “love” in Simplified Chinese is ”爱”， while in Traditional Chinese, is ”愛”. Besides different characters, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese might be different in some terms, especially for those terms translated from another language.