Chinese Converter
Convert between Simplified and Traditional Chinese locally in your browser: 2,443 high-frequency character pairs plus 177 Taiwan phrase entries. Punctuation, digits, English and line breaks stay as they are.
How to use
- Paste the text into the input box. Results refresh as you type, and no button press is needed.
- Pick the direction with the chips for Simplified → Traditional or Traditional → Simplified. Both directions share the same character and phrase tables.
- Read the counters under the result box: total characters and phrase replacements, so you can check whether terms were swapped as expected.
- Press Copy to take the result, or press the feed-back button to run the output through the opposite direction and verify the round trip.
- The table covers high-frequency pairs, polyphonic characters take their common side, and regional wording comes from the phrase list. Review important documents after converting.
FAQ
Is this a character-by-character replacement? Can it make mistakes?
Why does one word become a different word entirely?
Why do characters like 面, 制 and 表 stay unchanged?
Is my text uploaded, and where does the data come from?
How to use
- Paste your text
Paste the content into the input box. Mixed Chinese, punctuation, digits and line breaks are all fine, and the result refreshes as you type without any button press.
- Pick a direction
Use the chips to switch between Simplified → Traditional and Traditional → Simplified. Both directions share one character table and one phrase list.
- Check the counters
Under the result box you see the character total and how many phrases were replaced. An unexpected number usually means a proper noun hit the phrase list.
- Copy or feed back
Copy sends the result to the clipboard. The feed-back button puts the output into the input box and flips the direction, which makes round-trip checks easy.
- Know the limits
The table holds high-frequency pairs, polyphonic characters take their common side, and regional wording comes from the phrase list. Review important documents by hand.
About this tool
Simplified and Traditional Chinese share one writing system, and the differences live in two layers: glyph shapes and regional wording. This tool carries 2,443 high-frequency character pairs taken from the open-source OpenCC project, with TWVariants applied so the glyphs follow Taiwan conventions. Conversion runs in two passes. The first pass matches 177 phrase entries longest-first, so 软件 becomes 軟體, 鼠标 becomes 滑鼠 and 打印机 becomes 印表機. The second pass maps every remaining character through the table. Punctuation, digits, English text and line breaks never enter the mapping, so mixed-language paragraphs keep their structure.
The phrase list also holds protection entries for words where the default glyph choice would be wrong. In 皇后 and 公里 the characters 后 and 里 would normally turn into 後 and 裡. Both words keep their written form in Traditional text, so the phrase pass catches them first. Regional wording works the same way: 视频 maps to 影片, 数据 maps to 資料 and 信息 maps to 資訊. Once a phrase matches, the span is skipped entirely, which mirrors the layered design of OpenCC and keeps round trips faithful.
How it works
The converter works in two layers. The phrase layer stores 177 entries indexed by length. It scans the text from left to right, replaces the longest match at each position, and then skips the whole span. A matched word is never touched again. The character layer keeps the table as two index-aligned strings, one Simplified and one Traditional. A lookup moves a character to its partner at the same offset. Anything outside both layers passes through untouched. This design keeps common words on regional conventions, while the rest falls back to per-character defaults.
The hard choices sit with polyphonic characters. Characters like 发, 干 and 后 have several Traditional counterparts. OpenCC ships a default candidate for each, so 发 maps to 發, 干 to 幹 and 里 to 裡. High-frequency words such as 头发 or 干净 are corrected by the phrase layer, while rare combinations may still need a manual pass. The pair 着 and 著 is left untouched because both forms are accepted in Traditional text. The whole table stays under 15 KB, loads with the page and converts locally with no network requests.
When to use it
- Documents for Taiwan and Hong Kong
Convert announcements, manuals and emails from Simplified to Traditional before sending them to readers in Taiwan or Hong Kong. The phrase list turns 软件, 网络 and 视频 into 軟體, 網路 and 影片, which reads closer to local conventions. Give important documents one proofreading pass after converting.
- Working with Traditional sources
Turn Traditional web pages and reference material from Taiwan or Hong Kong into Simplified text for search, excerpts and archives. Switching directions takes one click. If a name or term was altered by the phrase list, compare against the original and restore it by hand.
- Teaching and proofreading
In language classes and proofreading workflows, the feed-back button checks how a word is written in both directions with one click. Students see glyph differences directly, such as 后 versus 後 or 发 versus 發. Editors can also confirm whether regional wording was replaced as intended, then decide whether to restore an original term by hand. No manual table lookup is needed.
Tips & tricks
- When a word looks doubtful, feed the result back through the opposite direction. If it returns unchanged, the wording is covered.
- Phrase entries follow Taiwan conventions, so 视频 becomes 影片 and 数据 becomes 資料. If you only want glyph differences, check the phrase counter and review those spots.
- Convert long documents in sections. The tool suggests splitting above 30,000 characters.
Things to watch
- Polyphonic characters take the common side
Characters like 发, 干 and 后 map to several Traditional forms. The tool follows the default candidate, and common words such as 头发 are fixed by the phrase list to 頭髮. Rare combinations deserve a character-by-character check before you rely on the output.
- Regional wording varies
The same thing can be written differently in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The phrase list carries the common Taiwan side, such as 軟體 for 软件 and 滑鼠 for 鼠标. Brand names and official translations should follow the target region's own published spelling instead, not an automatic guess.
- Glyph conversion is not translation
The tool changes glyph forms and regional wording only, never sentence structure or argument flow. A converted article still reads like mainland writing, and word choices lean toward mainland usage as well. Formal publications therefore need an editor's pass beyond automatic conversion, ideally by someone familiar with the target region's style.