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Is there a way to translate programmatically from traditional to simplified Chinese characters? If so, how do you do it, does unicode offer a way? If not, why doesn't there exist a database with the mapping, is it not one-to-one? I know you can find a mirror image glyph from another glyph in Unicode, but can you find the simplified glyph from a traditional one?

Lance
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  • Though not a duplicate, the question [Detect if character is simplified or traditional Chinese character](https://stackoverflow.com/q/4619510/2985643) might be helpful. – skomisa May 08 '22 at 00:44
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    I'm no expert, but apparently translating between traditional and simplified Chinese is not as simple as you are hoping. I did a search for "unicode encoding for traditional and simplified chinese" and found the following https://r12a.github.io/scripts/chinese/ and https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050010392. – Stuart May 08 '22 at 01:37
  • Don't "translate": just use the correct font for what you want to show. They're two different styles for _the same text_. – Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans May 11 '22 at 00:52

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It is indeed not one to one. My favorite example to explain this quickly is this:

Take the character for face, 面. So far so good, it's the same in Traditional and Simplified Chinese. However, 面 is also the simplified version of 麵, noodle (where the 面 part on the right is the phonetic part). So if you have 面, you have no way of knowing which is which.

dda
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