Chinese translator
Chinese Translation and Interpreting Services
The term Chinese is broadly applied to many different forms of written and spoken languages and dialects. If you’re doing business with China, it’s worth understanding a little about these languages.
China’s Spoken Languages
Spoken Chinese is actually a collection of as many as seventeen major regional languages so different from each other that speakers of one often cannot understand speakers of another. Mandarin is the most common, with a number of native speakers greater than the entire population of Europe (about 840 million native-language Mandarin speakers). Three other important languages, Wu, Min and Cantonese, each have more native speakers than the populations of Italy, France or the UK. The next three languages, Hakka, Xiang and Gan, are the first languages of more than 30 million people each. Adding to the complexity, each of these languages has dozens of distinct regional dialects, making China home to hundreds of very different spoken languages and dialects.
Speaking Putonghua
An effort to adopt a single spoken language in China was started in the 20th century with the creation of Standard Mandarin (“Putonghua” or common language). Based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, Standard Mandarin is now the official spoken language of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Singapore, and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Putonghua may be the official language of the media, education and politics, but the other local languages still thrive. Most Chinese are multilingual, switching between their local dialects for casual conversation and Putonghua for business and formal situations.
Written Chinese
Fortunately, Chinese as a written language can be universally applied to any of the spoken variants. People from different regions of China may not understand each other when they speak, but they can read each other’s writing. In the 20th century, to increase literacy in mainland China, Simplified Chinese was created by reducing the number of strokes required for the more complicated characters, making them easier to write and memorize. Simplified Chinese is now the standard writing system for the People’s Republic of China, Singapore and Malaysia. Unmodified Traditional Chinese remains the standard in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and other overseas Chinese territories. On the left are some examples, with traditional forms in the first column, followed by their simplified forms, pinyin pronunciation, and English equivalents.
Implications for Localisation
Although Taiwan and Hong Kong both use Traditional Chinese, their writing styles have diverged noticeably. If you're writing for one of those two areas be sure to use local translators and editors. If, however, you’re targeting mainland China or Singapore, any educated mainland-Chinese translator can give you the Simplified Chinese you need. If you simply want to reach the broadest Chinese audience possible, go with Simplified Chinese. Considering that the People’s Republic of China alone has 1.3 billion inhabitants and 300 million internet users (making it the world leader in internet users), you can hardly go wrong.
If your translation will appear on a website, make sure you use the correct character encoding or your Chinese will appear as a string of meaningless characters. Use Big5 encoding for Traditional Chinese and GB2312 for Simplified, or save yourself trouble and ask us how to use Unicode for everything you do – it covers most known written languages.
Converting Between the Two Forms
Translating between Simplified and Traditional Chinese is relatively inexpensive because of the strong similarities. If you need both written forms, then translate into Simplified Chinese first because it’s cheaper (larger supply), and have that translated into Traditional Chinese. Your overall costs will be less than if you had translated directly into both. Ask Absolute Translations, we know how to arrange this.
CONTACT A TRANSLATOR:
TOLL FREE: 1800 500 791 or info@absolutetranslations.com.au
Brisbane: 07 3303 8527 or brisbane@absolutetranslations.com.au
Perth: 08 9278 2489 or perth@absolutetranslations.com.au
Gladstone: 1800 500 791 or gladstone@absolutetranslations.com.au
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