Between 1927 and 1937, China was engaged in a 10-year civil war between the ruling government of Republic of China (R.O.C. - Nationalist Party) and the challengers of the Communist Party of China lead by Mao Zedong. In 1949, Mao was victorious in gaining control of China and formed P.R.C., the Nationalist Party fled to Taiwan, remains as R.O.C. where Red China has never ever controlled the island since then.
Red China started to simplify Chinese during 1950s-1960s. The initial purpose is to destroy old culture, improve literacy rate and to build a "New China". Moreover, the Cultural Revolution took place from 1966 to 1976 and Mao decided to destroy anything that is "traditional" tied to Feudalism, the Traditional Chinese officially "disappeared" form China. The written Chinese splits into two systems til present.
Simplified Chinese is used in Mainland China and adopted only in Singapore.
Elsewhere Chinese ignored them as an unnecessary or resisted them as political, identity objectionable.
Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macow and overseas Chinese comminuties. Simplified Chinese is used in Mainland China and Singapore. There are also a few local characters, such as for Cantonese in Hong Kong, that are not in widespread use.
Spoken Chinese is separated into 5 main dialectical groups, of which Mandarin is only one. Yue (which includes Cantonese), Min, Wu and Hakka make up the other four, covering more than 200 individual dialects.
The vast majority of the Chinese-speaking population is in China (over 980 million), Hong Kong, and Taiwan (19 million), but substantial numbers are also found throughout the whole of Southeast Asia, especially in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Important Chinese-speaking communities are also found in many other parts of the world, especially here in Europe, North and South America.
Simplified Chinese is simply a simpler version of Traditional Chinese. The Simplified Chinese writing system differs in two ways from the Traditional writing system:
Targeting a geographic region the decision to use Simplified or Traditional Chinese becomes very clear. People in a different region will not use the other written system due to the historical, political and identity agreement.
Since the civil war splited Taiwan and China over 68 years, the written system with vocal terminology become very different on top of the many dialects and different Mandarin accents. For example, the Waze Voice Guide cannot be adopted easily to different regions.
Search Function
The way to search via Voice comnand, or simply the typing terminology, will be very chanllenging due to the localized facts.
Simplified Chinese - the reduction of the number of characters
Since there is not a one to one relationship between Simplified and Traditional Chinese. A single Simplified character may have several Traditional characters which can be used, but mean entirely different ideas to the reader. Simplified Chinese encoding simply cannot recognize the older and rarer forms of Traditional Chinese. Finally, terminology in different fields varies and cannot simply be automatically translated. No software can produce and accurate and appropriate translation. These differentiation will reflect on Waze's Voice Guide and tarnslations significantly. Thus human translation into two systems along with their own respects are essential.
Examples of Simplified Chinese converted from Traditional Chinese -
Loosing its original meanings.
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