Simplified and Traditional Chinese Converter

Simplified and traditional are not two languages

They are two ways of writing the same one. The simplified forms were adopted in mainland China in the 1950s and 1960s: a few thousand characters were given fewer strokes, usually by keeping a recognisable part of the original or by adopting a cursive form that scribes had used for centuries. Traditional characters continued in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and in most Chinese-speaking communities abroad.

The names GB and Big5 are the encodings rather than the writing systems, and they stuck: GB is the mainland standard, Big5 the one that grew up in Taiwan. Today both are usually stored as Unicode, but the two sets of characters remain distinct, and a reader used to one can find the other slow going.

Conversion is mostly mechanical, and this tool does it in both directions. Mostly, because the mapping is not one to one in the difficult cases: a single simplified character sometimes stands for two or three traditional ones that were merged, and choosing between them needs the meaning of the sentence. Simplified to traditional is therefore the direction to check; the other way round is safe.