Simplified and Traditional Chinese are two ways of writing the same language family. They share history and many characters, but they are not interchangeable in every context. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and many overseas communities still use Traditional characters. Mainland China and Singapore use Simplified characters.
This section explains the writing systems, regional variants, and the practical work of converting characters. It does not teach you to translate a document into another language. Conversion changes 门 to 門. Translation would decide whether a sentence should say "door," "gate," or something else.
Choose a conversion standard
OpenCC, the library behind this site, supports more than one Traditional target. Taiwan and Hong Kong do not always use the same character or vocabulary. See Taiwan vs Hong Kong Traditional Chinese and OpenCC conversion types.
After you convert
Character conversion can be one-to-many. One Simplified character may map to several Traditional forms. That is why a pass of proofreading still matters, especially in names, legal text and published books.
When you are ready to convert a paragraph, use the text converter. For a whole file, use the document converter.