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

I know nothing about any form of Chinese, but by looking at the examples in this Wikipedia page I'm inclined to think that automatic conversion is possible, since many of the phrases seem to use the same number of characters and even the some of the same characters.

I ran a quick test using a multibyte ord() function and I can't see any patterns that would allow the automatic conversion without the use of a (huge?) lookup translation table.

Traditional Chinese 漢字
Simplified Chinese  汉字

function mb_ord($string)
{
    if (is_array($result = unpack('N', iconv('UTF-8', 'UCS-4BE', $string))) === true)
    {
        return $result[1];
    }

    return false;
}

var_dump(mb_ord('漢'), mb_ord('字')); // 28450, 23383
var_dump(mb_ord('汉'), mb_ord('字')); // 27721, 23383

This might be a good place to start building the LUTT:

• Simplified/Traditional Chinese Characters List

I got to this other linked answer that seems to agree (to some degree) with my reasoning:

There are several countries where Chinese is the main written language. The major difference between them is whether they use simplified or traditional characters, but there are also minor regional differences (in vocabulary, etc).