Simplified/Traditional Chinese

a confusing lot of characters

The Chinese language has a long history of using logograms (ideograms, or 表意文字) as characters. Her possible precusors appeared as early as 8,000 years ago. A complete writing system had been developed by 3,500 years ago. The use of Chinese characters have also influenced the local region, among mostly east Asian countries, and still exists in some major east Asian languages like Japanese (かんじ, or 漢字), traditional Korean (한자, or 漢字) and the former Vietnamese or Annamese (hán tự, or 漢字).^[1]

About 4% of the Chinese characters are pictograms (象形字), while the other 95% are logical compounds (会意字) and pictophonetics (形声字). According to the Kangxi Dictionary (《康熙字典》)^[2], which was compiled in the 1710’s and completed in 1716 (康熙五十五年三月十九, there were in total 47,035 Chinese characters—a large portion of them were rarely used variants accumulated through the history. The latest version of Unicode (as of 2008), Unicode 5.1.0, designates over 70 thousand code points for CJK ideograms and related symbols.

Given the sheer amount of Chinese characters in store, the matter has been complicated quite a bit since the adoption of Simplified Chinese characters (简体字) by the People’s Republic of China in the 1950’s for promoting literacy. Today, Simplified Chinese is the official form of Chinese characters in mainland China, Singapore and the Unite Nations, whereas Traditional Chinese is used in Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, Taiwan and many overseas Chinese communities.

Recognizing the difference in morphology and mapping characters from one form to the other is the most difficult part of mastering both the simplified and the traditional forms of Chinese characters. Things get even worse since both forms do not always have a one-to-one mapping—some simplified characters may map to multiple traditional ones depending on the contextual information, and vice versa.

Some youths in mainland China rely on IMEs that can “automatically output traditional Chinese characters when a simplified characters is input,”^[3]^[4]^[5] which creates a lot of misunderstanding and misuse of characters^[6]. The fact, unfortunately, is that one who translates Simplified Chinese to/from Traditional Chinese requires lots of contextual information in order to perform the task at three different levels: character-based translation, character-based translation with word amendments and professional translation^[7].

Here, I’m trying to put together a table of most commonly misused Chinese characters, whose simplified and traditional forms do not have simple one-to-one mappings. I hope the table could benefit those who have learnt only one of the two forms of Chinese characters and help them in their communications with other Chinese communities.