CHINESE TRANSLATION

Need Chinese Translation? Our certified, experienced translators can translate your printed documents or website from English to Chinese.

SIMPLIFIED OR TRADITIONAL?
The first question that must be asked with Chinese translations is "Do you need 'Simplified' or 'Traditional'?" It depends on which country you are targeting. Use the listing below:

Mainland China — Simplified Chinese
Taiwan — Traditional Chinese
Hong Kong — Traditional Chinese
United States —- Traditional Chinese (generally)
Macao — Traditional Chinese
Singapore — Simplified Chinese

MORE INFORMATION
For a quick step-by-step information guide regarding pricing, timelines and more for your Chinese translation, start here.

ABOUT CHINESE
With over 1.3 billion speakers, the #1 spoken language in the world is Chinese. Chinese is one of the most commonly translated languages and one of the most complex languages to work with. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

There are many different dialects within the Chinese language. Mandarin is the most common, used by over 3/4 of Chinese-speaking people in China. Cantonese is the dialect used most often in the United States. Cantonese is also spoken in Thailand, Hong Kong, and the extreme southern provinces of China. Besides Cantonese, other non-Mandarin dialects are Wu, Min, Hsiang, and Hakka.

Chinese is written with thousands of distinctive characters called ideographs. The largest Chinese dictionaries contain up to 50,000 of these characters. They are made up of two elements — asignific (the meaning) and aphonetic (the sound). Some take up to 33 strokes to make just one character. Despite their complexity, these characters have the advantage of making written communication possible between people speaking mutually unintelligible dialects and languages.

Beginning in the 1950s, the People's Republic of China began working towards simplifying the Chinese system of writing. These newer, simplified characters are easier to read and write and are more commonly used by the younger people. The older generation still prefers to use Traditional Chinese.

If we can stay within Microsoft Office when working with computer software, we can use the built-in Unicode fonts, which include Chinese characters. Other programs use these, too, but generally if desktop publishing is involved, separate Chinese fonts are used within a Chinese operating system (OS); English programs do not accept the Chinese versions. If a Chinese file is needed, type set in Chinese fonts can be saved as outlines and imported into desktop publishing files as graphics.