Essential Role of English to Mandarin Chinese Translation as a Cultural Element

Before talking about English to Mandarin Chinese Translation lets first take a look on each individual language. English is basically a West Germanic language that was initially spoken in England but now it is most extensively used language all over the world. It is official language of around 60 sovereign states and is extensively accepted as second language or official language in many countries. Even though English is accepted by many counties there are more native speakers of Chinese as compared to English.

  When Simplified Chinese or Mandarin introduced?

In 1949 the People’s Republic of China introduced a simplified form of writing known as Simplified Chinese to promote literacy. Simplified Chinese or Mandarin is a variation of the Traditional form of the written language and is an official language of Mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore and the United Nations. However Traditional Chinese is written and Cantonese is spoken in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In China most of the Chinese can speak Mandarin and can write in Simplified Chinese.

Chinese translation is not as simple as it seems since Chinese can be written either using Traditional characters or Simplified characters. The complexity of language is because of various reasons firstly Chinese language itself have various dialects in various regions. Use of correct character set based on the audience of document is vital for the success of Chinese translation. If your document is intended to be read in mainland China or Singapore then translations should be in Simplified Chinese or mandarin Chinese whereas if your audience is located in Hong Kong, Taiwan or Macau then document should be translated in Traditional Chinese .Simplified writing system unlike from traditional writing system have less numbers of strokes per character and have reduced amount of characters for same sentence.

The Role of Simplified Chinese in language translation:

Basically Chinese writing system is based on spoken Mandarin and is also known as "zhōngwén" and "hànyŭ”. Whenever translation needs to be colloquial – for example, translating a training handbook for salesmen – the process of translation becomes more difficult since different regions will have different language habits and all those differences have to be taken into consideration.

Secondly complexity comes with the huge difference gap between the Chinese and English languages. Chinese doesn’t spell phonetically as there is no link between how a word is read and how it is written. Plural forms, Indirect requests, Understatement, double negatives, complex long sentences, use of “the” and terms like “given that” and “whichever is greater” are just few of very long list of things that are regularly mistranslated.

Conclusion:

A translated document requires employing the language traditions and styles according to the target Chinese audience due to the intricate relations between language and culture .But it always remain a problem to properly convert English to mandarin Chinese translation as cultural elements play essential role. An in complete understanding of the culture can hurts someone felling or can leads to annoy someone. To have a proper translation ideally English to mandarin translator needs to be a native mandarin speaker with a good knowledge of English. A firm which is expert in English / Chinese language pair is also an excellent choice, since they usually have both native English speakers and native Mandarin speakers who work together on translation projects to give high quality product.

Chinese translation demands expertise while translation

While English is the widespread language of business and commerce, but with the growing economy of China more and more companies are seeking professional English to Chinese translation service providers. As the markets of Taiwan and Hong Kong are growing rapidly, for expanding business, organizations regularly demand the need to translate English to traditional Chinese.

Demand of Simplified and traditional Chinese

Simplified characters are used by Mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, while Hong Kong, Macau, Mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia and many other overseas Chinese communities use traditional characters. Traditional characters have been accepted as an official writing system in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. On other hand Mainland China uses simplified characters, and produces its printed material in traditional characters for the use in overseas communities. In fact, Traditional Chinese is not only used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, but also used widely in China mainland, Guangdong Province. Cities, like Shenzhen of Guangdong Province, Guangzhou still reserve the culture of translational China, since Cantonese is the most popular dialect in Guangdong Prov.

Traditional Chinese is the more formal form of the Chinese language. As the name suggests, traditional version has been written by Chinese people thousands of years ago. It differs from its counterpart, Simplified Chinese. Simplified Chinese contains fewer Chinese characters and was intended to increase the literacy rate among those living in China. In the business world, especially relative to manuals, procedural guides, safety guides, etc. the likely choice of Chinese languages is that of the Traditional Chinese. If the industry has roots in America, there will be a need for English to Chinese traditional translation and traditional Chinese translation to English translation services.

Traditional Chinese characters are complex because they contain more brush strokes per character, and are mainly used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and various other areas in the English speaking world. Although people in Mainland China and Singapore began to adopt the Simplified text after 1949, and more and more publications are using simplified characters, people in HK and Taiwan continued to use the “old” traditional text due to the political separation.

There are also differences between traditional Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong and simplified Chinese in Mainland China not only in form, but also in style and expression. Different expressions are used in traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese translation when translating the same word.

Complexity of languages demands expert translators.

The English to traditional Chinese translations can lack readability or “flow” unless the translator is highly skilled. Traditional Chinese translation services can be difficult for some Chinese translators to provide because the traditional form of the language is extremely complicated.

Firstly, Traditional Chinese translation demands more attention to have   concise words and expressions, especially in Taiwan’s traditional Chinese. Secondly, Traditional Chinese translation demands more attention to the elegance of words and expressions, in other words, traditional Chinese emphasizes the “written” or “formal” feature while simplified Chinese stresses the “spoken” feature of words and expressions. Hong Kong’s traditional Chinese seem to stand between Taiwan’s traditional Chinese and mainland’s simplified Chinese, being more concise than Simplified Chinese translation, while not as concise as that of Taiwan.

The complexity of translation from English to Traditional Chinese requires much more knowledge as a professional translator. One should have deep understanding of HK & TW culture and their language habits in order to handle a translation with high quality.

Challenges faced while translating English and Mandarin Chinese

English and Mandarin Chinese are two of the foremost significant and potent languages within the world today. With the advent of globalization, many multinational organizations are conducting their business in China. This has led to ever increasing demand for English to Mandarin Chinese translation services to perform precise translation. An accurate translation of languages when dealing with international businesses is very crucial.

Some points to know about English and Chinese

English is a West Germanic language that was initially spoken in England and is currently the foremost widely used languages in the world. It is spoken as a primary language by a majority of the inhabitants of many nations. It is the third most common native language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. Mandarin Chinese is the official language of Taiwan and Mainland China and is one among the official languages of Singapore and also of the United Nations. It is one of the foremost widely-spoken languages in the world.

Mandarin Chinese is usually referred to as a “dialect,” but the distinction between dialects and languages is not always clear. There are several versions of Mandarin spoken throughout China, and these are sometimes classified as dialects. Mandarin is basically part of the Chinese family of languages, that in turn is part of the Sino-Tibetan language group. All Chinese languages are tonal, which implies that the way words are pronounced varies their meanings.

Actually Mandarin is not a simplified Chinese and also Cantonese is not a traditional Chinese. Both Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken languages. A content written in traditional Chinese can be read in both Mandarin and Cantonese. Also, Mandarin can be written in either simplified or traditional Chinese. For instance, Mandarin is spoken in both Mainland China and Taiwan, however the previous uses simplified Chinese and the latter traditional Chinese. Due to the variation among Chinese languages, the interpretation from English to Chinese is not an easy job.

English to Mandarin Chinese translation can be a challenging task that demands accurate conversion to confirm the precise message comes across as supposed. There are a variety of free online dictionaries to translate languages; however, they are doing terribly poor job with a literal translation of documents or full sentences – typically inflicting serious repercussions.

There are many variations as mentioned below that make it challenging to accurately perform English to Mandarin Chinese translation.

- Mandarin make use of  a system having  logo graphic characters and symbols, whereas English have a            system of alphabet of letters.
- Grammar, verb and tenses are expressed very differently between English and Mandarin
- There are countless words that don’t have any direct translation, making untranslatable a massive and generally expensive variation.

The massive gap of expressions and correct usage of words is due to the fact that English and Chinese are rooted in totally different world views and dissimilar cultures. Due to the difficulties in translation, translating exact verbatim are often frustrating, confusing and hard to correctly align. Untranslatable is perhaps the foremost necessary aspect to consider when dealing with English to Mandarin translation.

Choosing the best English to Mandarin translation service can often be stressful as there are so many companies that produce mediocre work by not doing a good job of translating extremely important documents. This can obviously lead to costly consequences that shouldn't ever be risked. When dealing with business and important documents translation it’s very important to have professional translation services that can guarantee and stand behind their work.
For more details, visit our official site: www.ctc-china.com

Translation Company in China - Efficiency in International Business

You can find many Chinese translation agencies in China.The scope of these translation agencies is not limited to Chinese language translation, but they provide services to all language pairs. With major product and service hubs located in China and other service offices all over the world these Chinese translation agencies offer to serve around-the-clock. Chinese translation agencies have chosen their locations strategically to enable recruitment from all over the world so as to form an expert and caliber team that ensure a highly competitive global position.Many large scale Chinese translation agencies are building their offices in the local market of clients so as to provide better service to their clients as per the specific requirements and needs. Chinese translation agencies provide a whole host of language-related services. During Translation various in-language keywords are searched and saved in memory first. After searching keywords, these keywords are applied to translation and localization.These keywords ensure consistent output as same terminology and vocabulary is used throughout the translation project and all of in subsequent projects.

But of course, opting for Chinese translation agencies one can have many benefits as compared with other translation agencies in the world. Firstly, in china the cost of employee or man power is cheaper than other countries.

The Agency can hire expert professional in house translators to work for them with low cost. Secondly, cost of infrastructure established by Translation Company in China is much cheaper than in other countries. This low cost makes the Translation companies to offer low translation cost.Another reason to go for translation in China is that they are expertise in diverse fields of translation. With the growing economy more and more companies are expanding their business in China.

Translation Company in China is providing large market and experience to work with range of fields to Chinese translation. With years of experience Chinese translation agencies have gained proficiency to provide services to various fields like machinery,electronic, automobile, software’s,security and protection, medical, etc.Translation agencies provide effective process for translation of website, product manuals, promotional materials, user guides etc.

What are the various Software Translation procedures and strategies?

Nowadays, more and more people are using many kinds of softwares' in their daily work. They can not think of their lives without these softwares' but as we know, many of the softwares' comes with user interface written in English, and lot of people could not read English at all. So it is very important to do the Software Translation.  Now question is: 

What is the best approach to translate these softwares'? 

In general, the purpose of translation is to reproduce various kinds of texts—including religious, literary, scientific, and philosophical texts—in another language and thus making them available to wider readers.

If language would be just a categorization for a set of general or universal concepts, then translation from a source to a target language would be easy; furthermore, under these circumstances the process of learning a Software Translation would be much easier than it actually is. In this regard, Culler believes that languages are not nomenclatures and the concepts of one language may differ radically from those of another language, since each language articulates or organizes the word in a different way, and various languages do not simply name categories; they articulate their own.

The final conclusion likely to be drawn from what Culler writes is that one of the bothersome problems of translation is the inequality among languages. More the gap between the source language and the translated language, the more complex the transfer of Software Translation is from the former to the latter one.

The difference between a source language and the translated language and the variation of Software Translation makes the process of translation a real challenge. Various problematic factors are involved in Software Translation such as form, meaning, style, proverbs and idioms.

Let’s see the procedures for Software translation in general:

1. Technical procedures:
(a) Initial analysis of source and target language should be done.
(b) Before attempting to translate language a thorough study of the source language text should be made.
(c) Initially prior to Software Translation, judgments should be made for the semantic and syntactic approximations..

2. Organizational procedures:
(a)An organizational procedure says constant reevaluation of translation should be done. One should compare the existing Software Translation of the same text done by other translators and then check the text's communicative efficiency by asking the target audience to evaluate its accuracy and effectiveness and giving feedback. Study their reactions to improve software translation.

Moving further Krings translation strategy says “translator should potentially create plans for solving concrete translation issues in the framework of a concrete translation job," whereas Seguinot believes that translators should employee at least three global strategies

(i) Translation should be done without pause for as long as possible;
(ii) Translators should correct surface errors immediately;
(iii) One can leave the monitoring for qualitative or stylistic issues in the translation to the review stage.

However, Loescher translation strategy says "a potentially conscious procedure for solving a issue faced in translation of a text, or any segment of text." As it is mentioned in his definition, the idea of consciousness is important in distinguishing strategies which are used by the learners or translators. Moreover, Cohen asserts that "the factor of consciousness is what distinguishes strategies from these processes that are not strategic."

Furthermore, Bell differentiates among global strategies (dealing with whole texts) and local strategies (dealing with text segments) and confirms that this difference results from diverse kinds of Software Translation issues.

Anyway, Software Translation is very important in our daily life now and one should learn basics of Software Translation. For more details, visit our official website: www.ctc-china.com

What is the need of a Document Translation Company?

Chinese language consists of a variety of languages or dialects that are diverse from each other. Chinese is spoken by around 1.2 billion people making it the most widely used languages.The criticality of Chinese Language demands the professional team to translate documents from other language to Chinese. Reasons for criticality of Document Translation from English to Chinese are following: 

• Chinese has two writing systems traditional and simplified. Traditional being used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau; whereas simplified is used in Mainland China and Singapore. As the name suggests, simplified Chinese is the ‘Simplified’ version of ancient and traditional Chinese language. It is the official language of China. Variations in the two writing systems are so wide that only native experienced translators are adept to translate the language.

• Chinese is double byte language and is full of homophones (words with same pronunciation).

• There are various symbols and icons which have cultural meaning. A wrong use of any symbol can unknowingly offend, by conveying an erroneous message. Like Clock, number 4 and number 7 may relate to death. Red is a color of joy and happiness.

• In Chinese, generally words that form sentence don’t have space which makes it more complex to understand as compared to English.

•  Chinese culture is full of rituals and values.

•  Chinese writing system consists of almost 50,000 characters called as ideographs which make it more complex to translate. 

Complexity in language demands a team of professional experts to do document translation and these experts are provided by translation services. An expert team constitutes Chinese linguists, professional auditors and publishing department.

Role of Chinese linguists in document translation:

Localization is a value added step that ensures the consistent and accurate use of terminology. Chinese linguists translate and localize the documents. They provide all technical translations which include change of number system, style, measurement system, date and currency format, etc. Document translation services generate a translated version of user manual, marketing brochures, business documents, website content etc. that is approachable for the local audience of that place.

Role of Professional Auditors in document translation:

A team of Quality assurance generally called as auditors checks the consistency and accuracy of translated document. Team of auditors is always different from translators. Selection of auditors is based on their expertise in domain of translated document. Proficiency in particular document translation helps them to validate terminology used in translation.

An auditor also checks the fluency on the document translated.During translation due to different language and grammar logics, sometimes the order of each part of sentence needs to be exchanged so as to make the sentence fluent and conversational. Auditors make sure that the fluency of document remains consistent throughout the document.

Role of Publishing Department:

Publishing department ensures that the formatting of the translated document is same as source document specification. During Desktop publishing an audit team works side by side to check the accuracy level in formatting. A consistent format in different language versions improves company’s image amongst potential clients.

The Document Translation Company provides a guaranteed quality product. Their professional team ensures that the functionality and appearance of the document translated meet the Chinese market demand.

Importance of Software Translation

Software translation means translating the software in a manner, enabling the software to work in any part of world. This is essential to reach a larger consumer market. Nowadays, almost all the software companies have global business and they want to supply user friendly and the best local language version of software. Let’s take Microsoft as an example, each year Microsoft spends millions of dollars on software translation of various language pairs. Software translation being the most imperative step during the product development requires a professional translation company to achieve the constancy and accuracy in translation. Before selecting any agency for translation, one must check the capabilities of the agency.  

To evaluate a translation agency investigating the following points can be helpful:

•  Company must have expert translators who are specialized in the industry of software. The translator being specialized in the industry can provide translated document such as software front end or user interface, online help files, user guides and many more with accurate terminology. Like for SAP software translation project, the translators should have experience in software translation of ERP industry. Software translation demands professional and profound knowledge on the software usage and modules and a very deep understanding on the local language environment. 

• Agency must provide localization of software to make it relevant and acceptable to local audience of that place. Localization makes the product correct in terms of culture and terminology.

• Agency should have a smart quality control system for software translation project; the best QA system in the TEP procedure, which means translation, editing and proofreading for software translation project can lower the issue rate in the software translation to the minimum level.

• Company should test the software to check the translated software compatibility. While testing, the agency checks linguistic issues that ensure the correct use of currency, date, calendar and measuring symbols. A testing team validates that every feature works as it is in translated version as it was working in the original source language. Agency must provide a team of professional testers who run manual and automated test scripts to locate a bug or failure. Bugs must be reported to the concerned person, through bug tracking tool and retested once the bug gets fixed. All bugs needs to be fixed before the final delivery of product.

• Agency should ensure that the font and formatting remains same in all versions of software. Color scheme used should be innocuous and there should be no deviation from the original theme. It should be culturally correct.

• Agency should possess the capabilities to provide timely delivery of product. Most agencies make false promises that are completely intolerable, when it comes to deliveries. Such delays can lead to delay in product launch and may generate the possibility of launch of same product by other brands. In this day and age, when time is of the essence, such delays are not only unwarranted, but can be cataclysmic to a brand. This can influence the market value of product. One can check with other client references to ensure the timely delivery of product or can sign a legal document freezing deadlines.

• Last but not the least is confidentiality. A proper agreement for security and privacy policy needs to be signed to ensure that the information about company confidential documents will not be misused, misplaced or misrepresented.

These guidelines can be a very useful guide for anyone looking for translation company or translation services.