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.