Despite sharing some vocabulary, Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible, owing to their differing systems of grammar, lexicon and pronunciation. With 60 million speakers, Cantonese Chinese is also a main dialect of Chinese, spoken primarily in southeastern China (an area historically known as Canton), as well as by a large number of Chinese expatriates worldwide. Formed of a group of regional dialects spoken in places such as Shanghai, Suzhou, Ningbo and Wuxi, it has roughly 70 million people speakers. Wu, or Shanghainese, is another key dialect of the Chinese language, second only to Mandarin. Through a national education push, it is hoped that the whole of China will achieve a “basic” level of Mandarin by 2020. Accoring to official estimations, roughly 70 percent of Chinese citizens currently speak Mandarin as a first or second language. Mandarin is also referred to as Standard Chinese and is the official state language of China, Taiwan and one of the official languages of Singapore. Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect and is most typically spoken in northern and southwestern China. With approximately 960 million speakers, Mandarin is the most commonly spoken dialect. Linguists disagree on just how many varieties of Chinese exist, but it is generally accepted that there are between 7 and 13. Mandarin dialects are spoken by 71.5 percent of the population.Īlthough native speakers will often describe Chinese as a single language, it is in fact more accurately thought of as a language family all of its own. The Chinese language has seven major dialect groups, and each has its own variations.Chinese is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, along with Arabic, English, French, Russian and Spanish.It consists of more than 20,000 distinct characters. Written Chinese dates back over 3,000 years.With nearly 1.3 billion native speakers worldwide, about 15% of the world’s population speaks a dialect of Chinese as their native tongue.Though their grammar systems and pronunciation differ significantly, Chinese characters are also used as part of the Japanese language. Today, this system continues to be used in mainland China, while the traditional version remains in use in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau. In the 1950s, a form of simplified Chinese was developed. Translation to and from Chinese therefore requires a great deal of creativity and experience, two things that machine translation simply cannot offer.Ĭhinese is the oldest written language on the planet and part of the Sino-Tibetan language family – a language family descended from Proto-Sino-Tibetan. English and Chinese orignate from completely unrelated language groups, making them vastly different from each other not only in terms of language, but also in terms of their cultural and social reference points. You should always be wary of machine translation (MT), but especially when translating from English to Chinese or Chinese to English. Simplified Chinese is predominantly used in Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore, whereas Traditional Chinese is primarily used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Although this sounds confusing, it is fairly straightforward to decide which form of the language to use based on where your target market are located. As a result, two versions of written Chinese came into being: Traditional and Simplified. In the mid-twentieth century, in an effort to increase the literacy rate, the People’s Republic of China began a process of simplifying written Chinese. There are two distinct versions of written Chinese. As a language rich in its own idioms and convolutions, a Chinese translator must also be equally confident in their grasp of the English language to avoid any loss of meaning in their translations.Ĭhinese translation tips Traditional vs Simplified Chinese A piece of writing that works for one section of the population may not work for another, meaning only translators with a firm grasp of regional differences can be trusted to create work that produces the intended effect. With seven distinct Chinese dialects and many more local dialects – which are often not mutually intelligible – the intended audience of a piece of translated writing must also be carefully considered. This poses a challenge for any professional translator, who must fully understand the intended purpose of a sentence and the language’s intricacies to avoid misunderstandings. The Chinese language is highly contextual, meaning slight changes in character composition can alter the meaning of a phrase completely. Despite being two of the world’s most commonly spoken languages, English and Chinese are extremely dissimilar each containing its own linguistic subtleties and complexities.
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