Chinese converter
Convert between Simplified and Traditional Chinese, with Taiwan and Hong Kong variants and optional regional vocabulary. Runs entirely in your browser.
Runs in your browser
With this on, 软件 becomes 軟體 rather than 軟件 — the word people in Taiwan actually use, not just the traditional spelling of the mainland term.
Character conversion is not the whole job
Converting 软件 to 軟件 gets the character forms right and the vocabulary wrong. In Taiwan the word is 軟體. Both are “traditional Chinese”; only one is what a reader in Taipei would write.
The regional vocabulary option handles this, using OpenCC’s phrase tables rather than a character-by-character mapping. A few common cases:
| Mainland | Taiwan | Hong Kong |
|---|---|---|
| 软件 | 軟體 | 軟件 |
| 网络 | 網路 | 網絡 |
| 打印机 | 印表機 | 打印機 |
| 信息 | 資訊 | 資訊 |
| 鼠标 | 滑鼠 | 滑鼠 |
Turn it off when you want the character forms changed and the wording left exactly as written — quoting a source, for instance.
Why Simplified to Traditional is the hard direction
The simplification of the 1950s merged distinct characters. 发 is both 發 (to issue) and 髮 (hair); 干 covers 幹, 乾 and 干. Going the other way, the correct traditional form depends on the word:
- 头发 → 頭髮 (hair)
- 发展 → 發展 (development)
A converter that works one character at a time gets these wrong roughly whenever they appear. OpenCC resolves them by matching the longest known phrase first, which is why the Simplified → Traditional dictionary is around ten times the size of the reverse and is loaded only when you pick that direction.
Even so, no converter is perfect: an unusual name or a word absent from the phrase tables can still take the wrong form. Proofread anything that matters.
Hong Kong and Taiwan are not the same standard
Both write traditional characters, but the standard forms differ in a number of cases — Taiwan’s 教育部標準字體 against Hong Kong’s 常用字字形表. 裡 and 裏 (“inside”) is the most visible pair: Taiwan prefers 裡, Hong Kong 裏. Pick the target that matches your audience.
Your data stays here
The dictionaries are downloaded to your browser and the conversion runs there. Whole documents can be pasted in without any of the text being uploaded — the reason this is worth using over a server-side converter for anything unpublished.