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Chinese Translation Guide
The Chinese Language
Chinese is one of three subfamilies of the Sino-Tibetan group of languages, which also includes Thai and Tibeto-Burman. Over one billion people in Asia speak languages belonging to this family. Spoken languages in this family are tonal - different tones differentiate words otherwise pronounced alike. The most widely spoken form of Chinese in the world is Mandarin, originating in the northern areas of China, sybmlized by local Beijing, of which the various dialects are spoken by 867 million people. Other forms of spoken Chinese include Cantonese, spoken by 70 million people and the dominant dialect for U.S. immigrants; Wu, spoken by about 87 million people; and Taiwanese, spoken by some 50 million.
The Chinese writing system, developed over 4,000 years ago, consists of an individual character for every syllable; each character represents a single word or idea or meaning. This can be an obstacle to literacy; just reading the newspaper requires knowledge of several thousand characters. To address this issue, the government in China introduced simplifications of commonly used characters in 1956. Not all countries conerned followed, so written Chinese now has two forms:
Traditional -mainly in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but also Macao, Thailand, Indonesia, and other Southeast Asian and Western countries.
Simplified - People's Republic (mainland China), and Singapore.
Translating into Chinese is a unique challenge because of the various dialects as well as the two different writing methods. It is important to know your target audience and where they are located to reach them effectively. The majority of Chinese in the U.S. use Traditional Chinese, so for U.S. based immigrant populations, Traditional Chinese is the best choice given the target audience.
When computer processing and formatting Chinese documents, one must take into account the fact that characters are represented by two bytes instead of the single byte used in Latin based languages. Double-byte Chinese character sets include: GB and Unicode for Simplified Chinese, and Big 5 and Unicode for Traditional Chinese. Some applications, such as QuarkXPress and PageMaker, may require the use of special Chinese fonts and versions of the software in order to process Chinese text, and may not be available on Microsoft Windows platforms. Viewing translated documents on the screen may require these special fonts or software programs, or the document must be converted to a platform independent format such as Adobe Acrobat.
The Trans-Link Services Language Solution
Trans-Link Services provides accurate, qualified translations for English to/from Simplified and Traditional Chinese quickly for favourable rates. The following are just a few the reasons that we are the preferred Chinese translation source for so many famouss companies.
We employ experienced, native-speaking translators to ensure precise translations for your target audience.
Translation involves more skill than just knowing how to speak source and target languages. Therefore, we carefully select our translation and localization teams for their subject matter expertise, knowledge of dialects and culture of the audience.
Trans-Link Services has the expertise team required to make sure your translated documents are formatted properly for your web, software and print documents.
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