![]() However, this convention does not apply to the usage of names of political figures, e.g. For instance, a Chinese person named 王小刚 (literally translated to Wang Xiaogang), while Wang is his family name and Xiaogang is his first name (given name), however in most of the cases, in English it’s translated to Xiaogang Wang to fit the English convention. In Chinese language context, it’s always family name + given name. For the English language convention, it is always first name followed by middle name if any, then last (family name). ![]() In English it says “The Chinese new year is on the 5 th of February, 2019” while in Chinese it should be ‘ 2019 February the 5 th ’ (2019年2月5日).Īnother very common instance is about names. The same applies to the description of dates. That is, country name>province name>city name>street name>office number etc. For example, when describing addresses, unlike in English, where they start from office number, building name, street number, city, province and country name, in Chinese it is the other way around. Misunderstandings can happen if the translator is not aware of these differences. In Chinese, people have different ways of describing people’s names addresses, dates, etc. For example, English words are translated into multiple Chinese characters and DTP specialists should make sure to keep these characters together when they are breaking lines. This also causes challenges for desktop publishing (DTP) when formatting marketing collateral or advertisements where sentences are broken into different lines. Therefore, you can break the English sentence by cutting off the last part (here everyday), and the sentence is still complete, however you cannot do so for Chinese (or at least in the same way the English sentence is treated). In Chinese contexts, a sentence is usually a subject + when/where + verb + object, where in English, the adverbs are usually used at the end of the sentence. This is also because Chinese doesn’t use spaces between characters and the characters can be used as a word or a sentence depending on the context.Ĭhinese grammar is very different from English grammar resulting in sentence structures. Therefore translated Chinese texts typically uses less space than the original English texts. The Chinese writing system is made up of different characters, which usually require much less space than English characters. Traditional Chinese is the written form of Chinese used in regions like Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Malaysia and the spoken form is Cantonese (except for Taiwan). To put it simply, Simplified Chinese is the standard written form of Chinese and is most commonly used in Mainland China and Singapore, while Mandarin is the spoken form and is used in China, Singapore and Taiwan. Having a clear understanding of the differences is important because they are related to the locale you plan to target for your messages. Many people are confused over these two terms, along with Mandarin and Cantonese, when requesting Chinese translation. Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese? Based on the different regions, there are 2 writing systems of Chinese as well as the spoken form. The majority of Chinese characters consist of two elements 1) a signific, which indicates the meaning of the word, and 2) a phonetic, which indicates the sound. There are approximately 50,000 characters found in the standard Chinese dictionary. It is written using characters called ideographs. Below are some important tips to be aware of when you are translating from English into Chinese.Ĭhinese is spoken by over a billion people making it the most widely spoken language in the world. Translation into Chinese is complicated and the correct Chinese writing grammar and rules must be adhered to. The Chinese writing system and grammar are totally different than English and there are many aspects to consider when translating from English or another language into Chinese. The Chinese language is considered one of the most difficult and complicated languages to master as it is a collection of various languages or dialects that are significantly different from one another.
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