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

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.