Conversion from Simplified to Traditional Chinese

Question

If a website is localized/internationalized with a Simplified Chinese translation...

• Is it possible to reliably automatically convert the text to Traditional C

Answer 1

Fundamentally, simplified Chinese words have a lot of missing meanings. No programming language in the world will be able to accurately convert simplified Chinese into traditional Chinese. You will just cause confusion for your intended audience (Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan).

A perfect example of failed translation from simplified Chinese to traditional Chinese is the word "后". In the simplified form, it has two meanings, "behind" or "queen". When you attempt to convert this back to traditional Chinese, however, there can be more than two character choices: 後 "behind" or 后 "queen". One funny example I came across is a translator which converted "皇后大道" Queen's Road to "皇後大道", which literally means Queen's Behind Road.

Unless your translation algorithm is super smart, it is bound to produce errors. So you're better off hiring a very good translator who's fluent in both types of Chinese.