Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese Translation Services

China has the world’s second-largest economy and maintains its status as a leading exporter, manufacturing and industrial powerhouse, contributing to the country’s exponential economic growth over the last three decades.

With such a large global footprint, ALM’s professional Chinese translation services have always been in high demand, from translating technical manuals for specialist machinery to creating exciting and culturally engaging transcreated marketing material.

Chinese language

Chinese is thought to be the oldest written language in the world with character inscriptions dating back 3,000 years. As a character-based language, Chinese does not have a direct connection between the written and spoken forms. Unlike in word-based languages, such as French, Arabic and Greek, where the word “la” (written as لا and λα) has a roughly similar pronunciation based on how the language pronounces the letters “l” and “a” even if the meaning differs (to give us “the”, “no” and “la”, respectively), a Chinese character represents a concept, so different Chinese dialects will pronounce the same character differently, but the meaning will remain the same. This is why there is no direct correlation between the areas that speak Mandarin or Cantonese (or other dialects) and the areas that use Simplified or Traditional Chinese in writing.

Chinese encompasses 7 main dialects: Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Wu, Min, Xiang and Gan, with the Beijing dialect, Mandarin, being the standardised version of Chinese. Because these dialects are not necessarily inter-intelligible, the written form is the most common way to communicate.