The most basic unit of English is a word, which makes up sentences, but in Chinese, the most basic unit is a character. “English uses pinyin writing, while Chinese uses ideographic writing. While there may be many different varieties of Chinese, they all use the same written characters for Chinese text, similar to languages like Japanese and Korean. The more you know about their needs, dialects, and location, the more you’ll be able to engage the right translation team. This is why it’s so important to be specific about your audience. Mandarin Chinese is the official language of mainland China, while Cantonese is more often spoken in Hong Kong. In fact, some of the seven different varieties of Chinese are so different that even native speakers won’t understand one another. When we refer to Chinese, we’re actually referring to a few different versions of the Chinese language based on region: Mandarin, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Min, Cantonese, Hakka, Jin, Hui, and Pinghua. So we spoke to one of our expert Chinese translators to find out the key differences and challenges you need to know. Since China is one of the birthplaces of civilization, you may already know some Chinese words adapted to English, like feng shui, ginseng, monsoon, or ketchup.īut it’s hard to think of two languages more different from one another than English and Chinese. Five common challenges for English-Chinese translations (and what to do about them)

So if you’re thinking of expanding your business internationally, you’ll miss out on a huge audience if you don’t translate into Chinese. It’s also one of the six official languages of the United Nations, along with English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Russian.Ĭhinese speakers reside all over the world, including in Singapore, Hong Kong, the United States, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and more. That’s significantly more than Spanish (460 million) or English (380 million). Over 1.3 billion people speak some form of the language today - 16% of the entire world’s population. By far, the language spoken by most people in the world is Chinese.

Chinese english translator