Writing a resume - traditional vs. simplified chinese

Question

I'd like to know which criteria do chinese use when writing a resume. I know that in Taiwan most people use simplified chinese, but what about the rest of China? Is it common to find both simplified and traditional characters mixed in a resume? The election of one type of writing depends on the education level the person has? Thanks for your help

Answer 1

Short answer:

It depends on the intended reader of the text.

In most of the settings, it is not encouraged to mix Traditional Chinese characters and Simplified Chinese characters.

Long answer:

Simplified Chinese normally referred to Chinese used in mainland China. Officially, this varient of Chinese is often called Mandarine. And the term Simplified Chinese is the character set used in Mandarine. The latest standard is 通用规范汉字表2013 (General Standard Chinese Characters Table). Beyond that, Simplified Chinese are also used in some other areas, but not as official language.

Traditional Chinese is used in countries/regions such as Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. But there are subtle differences in those variants. You can consider Simplified Chinese as US English and Traditional Chinese TW as UK English, and Traditional Chinese used in Hong Kong as Australian English which follows spelling of UK English in many cases but still there are differences between the two.

One more thing

Despite the difference in the shapes of characters, there are more complicated differences between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

For example, character 后 in Simplified Chinese has two meanings:

1. After/behind

2. Empress

However, in Traditional Chinese, there are two characters for these two meanings:

1. After/behind 後

2. Empress 后

This is a common mistake made by people in Mainland China who tries to use Traditional Chinese just to impress others but get it backfired on them.

So what I'm trying to say is that conversion between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese is not a simple click-and-done process, let alone the vocabulary and usage differences.

Although most people in above mentioned areas normally can understand other variants of Chinese, since you mentioned using it in a formal document such as a resume, the mix or the two or the wrong use of them would be considered not very professional.

My suggestion is that the resume should be in the variant of Chinese required by the intended organisation. If the organisation do not have such requirement, use the official variant used by the organisation. If the organisation do not have an official variant, at least provide one error-free version in either Simplified or Traditional Chinese. If you want to present an international multilingual image, provide both, but do not mix them (this is the same as many signs in places like international airport, where even sometimes the simplified version and traditional version are the same, both are provided).

Answer 2

Simply depends on region. Put it this way: you use British English when you write resumes in Great Britain (and related regions/countries) and American English in the US. Nothing more than that. As you would not mix British and American English in an English resume, you would neither do so in a Chinese resume.

The places that use traditional Chinese are: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau.

The places that use simplified Chinese together with traditional Chinese: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand(See this). However using traditional Chinese in such regions can't go wrong.

The place that uses simplified Chinese only: mainland China.