Mainland Chinese getting it wrong with traditional characters

(This is a side note to the page The Chinese Writing System)

With the revival of traditional characters in signboards, advertising titles, and some other commercial materials on the Mainland, the amalgamation of characters in the simplified script causes problems.

For example, the two traditional characters zhun³ 'standard, accurate' and zhun³ 'allow, grant' have been amalgamated into the single simplified character zhun³. The word biao¹-zhun³ 'standard' is thus simplified as on the Mainland.

This leads to problems going the other way. To convert to traditional characters, Mainlanders generally rely on automated computer programs, which are not very sensitive and come up with instead of the correct . Not having learnt the traditional script, the typical Mainland Chinese has no way of knowing that this is the incorrect form unless he/she checks a dictionary.

As a result countless Mainland printed materials and websites have the incorrect form biao¹-zhun³. (This can be easily confirmed by a Taiwan or Hong Kong Google search for -- all examples that come up are Mainland sites). Many other similar errors can be found where traditional characters have been amalgamated into single simplified characters.

The opposite phenomenon also occurs, i.e., Taiwanese getting the Mainland characters wrong in Simplified character websites, although this is less common.

For a detailed treatment of this, see The Pitfalls and Complexities of Chinese to Chinese conversion.