If you have a product or service that targets native Chinese customers, you will need to consider at which region your campaign is aimed. Do you want to run a region-specific campaign for native Chinese speakers? Ultimately, they will think even more highly of you for having thought of that detail. In addition, wherever the person reading about you is from, they will feel more comfortable navigating in their type of writing. However, if your business is a hotel with a large influx of tourists from that region, you should invest in traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese so that potential visitors can find you using either type of writing. It would not make sense to translate it into both variants and ask your customer where they are from or what type of writing they prefer to read before giving them a menu. This is because it is the most widespread, and when only one of the two variants is chosen, it is usually simplified Chinese.įor example, if you have a restaurant in Barcelona and you want to translate your menu into Chinese because you have an increasing amount of customers who speak this language, we advise you to translate your menu into simplified Chinese. When a client wants to translate into Chinese and their target audience is not a specific region, they usually opt for simplified Chinese. Or maybe you want to attract more potential customers who speak Chinese? Given the great economic and growing commercial weight of the People’s Republic of China, we will almost always have to use the simplified characters.ĭo you have customers from China and want to offer them information in their own language? When we are asked to provide a translation into Chinese, we usually ask where the translation will be used. In fact, before the simplification, only highly educated Chinese could learn them. How did they do this? They modified the most complicated characters and simplified the rules to make their study easier and accessible to everyone, since traditional writing is much more complex and difficult to learn. Simplified writing was created in the 1950s by the communist authorities with the intention of combatting the illiteracy of the population.
In geographical terms, the main difference between simplified and traditional Chinese is that simplified Chinese is used in mainland China (territory of the People’s Republic of China), Singapore and Malaysia, while traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and the Chinese diaspora before the communist revolution. And although this may seem to complicate things, the choice is quite simple when you consider the points we will discuss below. It is true that Chinese writing consists of two types of characters: simplified and traditional. Have you decided to translate into Chinese, but don’t know which variant to choose? The difference between traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese Therefore, such illustrious figures as Mao Zedong (originally from Hunan Province) could not express themselves well in this language, as it was not their mother tongue. Mandarin was not required to be studied in Chinese schools until well into the 20th century. Mandarin is known in mainland China as pǔtōnghùa, which could be translated as “common language”, although in Taiwan it is often referred to as guóyǔ, i.e. Some of the most important minority languages in China are Cantonese, Wu, Min and Hakka, all of which have very different subdivisions. Mandarin is historically the language of the northern and central regions of the country, while in the more ethnically and culturally diverse southern regions, there are many other languages (which the Chinese call dialects), most of which are unintelligible to each other. The Mandarin currently spoken is based on the dialect of the Beijing region, although with some changes. In short, we could define the language we know in the West as “Mandarin Chinese” as the language used by the high officials of the imperial era (known as mandarins, who wore orange clothes, hence the name given to the fruit). In a country as vast and diverse as China, the need for a common language that can be understood by its more than 1.4 billion inhabitants (or at least the majority of them) is indispensable. When we talk about the “Chinese” language, we are actually talking about Mandarin Chinese, the only official language of the People’s Republic of China. Spanish to Mandarin translator Let’s start with some facts about the Chinese language
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