Facts to go
The number 1 language – with more than 1 billion native speakers
When it comes to the most widely spoken languages, Chinese is at the top of the tree: around 1.3 billion people in the world speak Chinese, which corresponds to around 15% of the world’s population. Most of them live – not surprisingly – in China and in other smaller Asian countries such as Taiwan and Hong Kong. But Chinese is also spoken widely in the rest of the world, and more and more people are learning the language. This is mainly the result of economic factors.
Through the growing economic influence of China, the Chinese language is gaining in importance. It has long been predicted that Chinese – alongside English – will become the new world language. More and more companies with a global orientation are attempting to establish themselves on the Chinese market.
Reaching a new market with Chinese – a brief how-to guide
Any entrepreneur who believes their company has a place on the world stage must have an eye on the Asian market, especially China. Reaching the Chinese market is certainly an extremely complex undertaking that cannot be covered in just a few lines. But there is one task that you cannot avoid: translating your messages into perfect Chinese. Most Chinese customers prefer to communicate and make purchases in their own language. In this context, your information should ideally not only be translated perfectly but also adapted culturally to the language and habits of your customers – in other words, localised.
As localisation is not necessarily a familiar term to everyone, here's a tip: we have summarised the differences between localisation and translation in our guide.
As the Asian market is very mobile and is based largely online, your first step should be to have your website translated (assuming, of course, that all your sales and logistics processes in the background are ready to start and in good working order). Along with the website, you should, of course, have all your other marketing materials translated, and you should not forget translations of contracts and legal documents. In other words: everything that you use to communicate on your home market should be prepared in Chinese – and ideally you should optimise the translations to suit your (future) customers.
Having texts translated into and from Chinese – what you need to consider
When we used the term Chinese, we are referring in most cases to Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is the most widely spoken variant in the Chinese-speaking area and has the largest number of speakers. In total, a distinction is made in linguistics between at least six dialect groups of Chinese, which can be subdivided further. The variants differ in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. For a translation into Chinese, it is therefore important to know which form of Chinese you are talking about.
One of the most challenging features of the Chinese language is the written characters. Chinese is written with characters consisting of thousands of complex symbols. In contrast to alphabetic languages, there are no clear rules for the pronunciation of characters, and every character can have different meanings depending on context. The grammar also differs significantly from European languages in the sentence structure, for example, and the use of tenses. All of this must be considered in a good Chinese translation. And since in most cases, the direction of the text changes in Chinese translations (in China, you write and read from top to bottom or right to left), it does not make much sense to render texts 1:1 in the target language. It is better to adapt the layout of the translation – and ideally, a native-speaker expert should do this.
In particular the regional and cultural differences in linguistic usage suggest that it is best to have Chinese texts translated (or texts translated into Chinese) by a professional translation agency. Native speakers provide the translation here, as they are familiar with the intricacies of the language. You will also get the best advice on Chinese translations from them.
