PS: Chinese who live outside of the mainland and/or use traditional characters (HK, Taiwan, Overseas Chinese in SE Asia, North America etc.) constitute a larger % of world trade than Chinese people in China. So your economic argument is a little off.
No offense, but what have overseas Chinese to do with this?
They do not “require” the products I am talking about nor do they have much of an argument if they live in another (non Chinese speaking) country.
And btw: Hongkong uses simplified characters in business dealings, not traditional. So it still leaves Taiwan as the only one …
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If Taiwan’s the only holdout and you don’t want to go to the hassle, just ignore it. Don’t do business here. Sounds simple enough … or should all governments change their official written languages so businesses would have an easier time of it? 
If we’re talking about economic benefit, the world would benefit by all switching to English. But I don’t know if that’s going to happen anytime soon.
xxx
Americans have simplified the English language to a degree, but they have not bastardized it (IMHO), and many new words have been coined there, some of which are even quite useful. However, I have found that there is not much difference in the vocabulary used by an educated American and an educated Brit. The same is true of mainlanders and Taiwanese I have met. I don’t think it is the case that ability to efficiently communicate ideas has been hampered by either American spelling or simplified characters.
I don’t see any evidence that simplifying characters has improved literacy rates. Improving the education system may contribute more to literacy rates than changing to simplified characters.
I also find it odd that people are talking about countries other than China, Taiwan, and HK that use such and such a type of Chinese characters. That’s like talking about what sort of Irish is used outside Ireland. AFAIK, only China, Taiwan, HK, and Singapore have Chinese as official languages. Are there others ?
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Good way to leave out the rest of my (short) post hot dini, especially as the rest of the post was my main point.
BTW, if you’re having that much trouble with Traditional Chinese characters, then stick with the simplified. 
(Hardest language ever devised by man? C’mon, guys, its not that difficult.)
I believe Taiwan’s literacy rate would compare favourably to mainland China’s. Therefore, I would choose the Traditional system. Why mess with success? It’s not like mainland Chinese people are gentically inferior to their Taiwan counterparts. If the Taiwanese can do it, the Chinese can too…
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so bastardizing a language thousands of years old just because the commies were too lazy to implement a proper educational system is ok? jesus, there’s a whole chinese art form devoted to the writing of characters. do mainlanders do calligraphy in simplified, as well?
Do you have figures to back up that statement or would you just like it to be that way? Also, you may notice two keys of your keyboard with the word “shift” printed on them. Try holding one of the shift keys down, type some letters and see the astonishing effect it has! 
xxx
if Taiwan’s the only holdout and you don’t want to go to the hassle, just ignore it. Don’t do business here … sounds simple enough.
You wish it would be that simple, besides I work for a local company. But our products are from overseas and I believe many other companies are in the same situation.
In Malaysia they happily accepted English documentation and did not ask for a Malay translation.
or should all governments change their official written languages so businesses would have an easier time of it?
No, but they should learn how to READ English. The government wants to promote English as a second language and says all government agencies should start to use it, but they still cry when we submit technical documentation (as provided by the vendor) in English.
Translating it takes time and is costly - especially if you consider that they probably don’t read it anyway …
A lot of this is simply down to personal opinion. I worked with a lot a Chinese legal texts in Shanghai when I was a paralegal, some were in SC, some (when we had JVs with a HK or Taiwan element) were in TC. I don’t really think one type was easier to read than the other, although if I was pushed I would say the TCs were slightly easier because the extra strokes in some characters gave the memory more to latch onto. I would say, having learnt both, that TCs are easier to memorise (I started with SCs) because the radicals are easier to identify and remember, and help you build up the character from memory by remembering the positions of the radicals. In the few hundred characters that have been simplified, the radicals are often either missing or malformed.
Of course writers of TC abbreviate their characters when writing by hand, just the way writers of English use cursive script when writing by hand. I don’t think there is any significance to this in terms of language reform.
And ironlady’s right. If trad characters are are real problem for anyone, then stick to simplified.
First, I think one of the big problems in Mainland China’s literacy rate is the vastness of the country and the remoteness of many places where it’s hard to find a willing teacher (who’s done more than a couple of years of schooling himself) let alone a school. So it might not really be fair to compare the literacy rate in Mainland China to the one in comparatively tiny Taiwan.
But it is a fact that literacy in Mainland China improved greatly during the 20th century (long ago, I wrote about some of this stuff in my thesis). I wouldn’t necessarily attribute this to Simplified or Traditional characters but mainly to the political efforts of, yes, the Communists. I don’t support the government in Mainland China, I don’t want to discuss advantage and disadvantage of Traditional and Simplified characters (I consider Simplified as easier because that’s what I learned and studied, but I’m pretty sure Traditional characters are just as easy - or hard- to study as Simplified, it’s a bit like the discussion on Hanyu Pinyin and Zhuyin Fuhao). I just think that it’s not fair to disregard the infrastructural factor when discussing literacy.
Secondly, I just talked to a friend of mine about the phenomenon that many of the younger Chinese have a really hard time remembering how to write Chinese characters by hand as they go on using the computer. This applies to me and many of my German Sinologist friends as well (don’t know about other foreigners). And I think I’ve already heard about Mainland Chinese to whom this also applies. What do you think about that? What could be done to prevent this? I personally don’t think that Chinese characters can be disposed off by using Pinyin or any other form of romanization. But how will future generations of Chinese get along without knowing how to write? I think Taiwan still is quite far from taking English as an official language, and I don’t really see the point in that unlike in countries where English is an official language because people of different cultures and mothertongues live there like Singapore. But what’s a country where the people don’t know how to write their own language? And it’s not like Japan or Korea where you can just use local scripts for the Chinese characters still in use.
What do you think about that?
Oh, and Rascal: Please don’t deprive me of my job here by forcing people to read English manuals and use English software 
Iris
The answer is that you can do calligraphy in simplified or traditional characters. However, everyone who learns calligraphy in mainland China learns to write traditional characters. Many of the simplified characters are based on cursive characters (caozi), which are in themselves a calligraphic style. Examples are the characters for gate (men) and dragon (long.) If people think those characters are ugly, it is because they haven’t learned to appreciate the beauty of cursive style calligraphy - It’s an acquired taste. If you have been reared on coca cola, you may find red wine disgusting. Similarly, you are used to seeing only printed characters, cursive script just looks like scribble. I will try to find a sample of Mao Zedong’s calligraphy (mostly cursive traditional characters) to illustrate the point. Another point of view might be that cursive characters look OK when they are hand written, but they should not look like that in print. That would be a reason for rejecting that particular category of simplified characters.
A sample of Mao’s brush writing: http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/callig/7crmaopo.jpg
Thanks, Iris, for saving me a lot of typing time by saying a lot of what I would have said.
Some statistics for reference:
Taiwan literacy 1952: 34%
Taiwan literacy 1994: 94%
Source for Taiwan: http://www.asianinfo.org/asianinfo/taiwan/pro-education.htm
Mainland China literacy 1949: 20%
Mainland China literacy 2000 (UNESCO estimate): 84.1%
Source for mainland: http://www.accu.or.jp/litdbase/policy/chn/ - No figures for Taiwan available on the UNESCO site.
Note: When the literacy rate in China was 20%, it was poor, ruled by the KMT and used traditional characters. When it was 84.1%, it was less poor, ruled by the Communist Party and used simplified characters. You can draw your own conclusions as to cause and effect.
More China statistics: http://www.accu.or.jp/litdbase/stats/chn/chn1.htm