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Chinese

Cantonese, as the language of Chinese settlements in North America and elsewhere, is the dialect that is best known in the United States. Mandarin, as the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan and as one of the official languages of Singapore, is the most widespread of the dialects.
The vast majority of the Chinese-speaking population is in China (more than 980 million), Hong Kong, and Taiwan (19 million), but substantial numbers are also found throughout the whole of southeast Asia, especially in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Important Chinese-speaking communities are also found in many other parts of the world, especially in Europe, North and South America and the Hawaiian Islands.

Two written forms - traditional and simplified Chinese
Chinese is written with thousands of distinctive characters called ideographs. These characters consist of two elements -a signific, which indicates the meaning of a word, and a phonetic, which indicates the sound.
About 40 years ago the new government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) made the decision to simplify the written Chinese language to make it easier for the general populace to become literate. Thus two distinct versions of written Chinese came into being - traditional and simplified Chinese. These are easy for the native speaker to tell apart.

Simplified characters are used in the PRC and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.

The simplified writing system differs in two ways from the traditional writing system: (1) a reduction of the number of strokes per character and (2) a reduction of the number of characters in common use (two different characters are now written with the same character).

Although simplified and traditional Chinese are only variations of written Chinese, it is not unusual to find that those who read only traditional Chinese cannot understand simplified Chinese, and vice versa. Therefore, it is important in Chinese translation to determine whether simplified or traditional Chinese should be used for a particular target market.

There are no differences between the basic vocabularies or grammatical structures of simplified and traditional Chinese. However, due to the limited communication between mainland China (using simplified Chinese) and Taiwan, Hong Kong and the overseas areas (using traditional Chinese), there are some differences in terminology, especially new cultural or technological nouns. For instance, the English computer phrase "open a file" is commonly translated in simplified Chinese as , while in traditional Chinese it is .

What is the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin? How are they related to traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese?
Mandarin is the main Chinese language. Cantonese is one of the Chinese dialects. In mainland China and Taiwan, most people can speak Mandarin, while Cantonese is only spoken in China's Guangdong Province and Hong Kong. Cantonese is more popular among overseas Chinese because most Chinese immigrants in North America come form Guangdong and Hong Kong.

It should be noticed that the Chinese character reform is only related to the transcription of Chinese, not the language itself. That is to say, traditional and simplified Chinese are only variations of the written forms, whereas Mandarin and Cantonese are related to its spoken form. They should not be confused, that is, Mandarin is not the same thing as simplified Chinese.

Coding systems for Chinese documents
One of the problems in Chinese computing is the variety of internal encodings that can be used to represent Chinese characters. The most common of these are Guobiao (abbrev., GB) and Big5 or Big-5.

Guobiao orGuojia Biaozhun Ma (..) the National Standard of the People's Republic of China, is the encoding method for written simplified characters.
Big5 or Big-5 or Dawu Ma (..) is the encoding method for written traditional Characters.

Both the GB and BIG5 encoding systems are used for computers in China. GB has been developed by Mainland China and BIG5 by Taiwan.

Is it possible to convert files between the GB and BIG5 encoding systems?
A computer with a traditional Chinese Windows system can recognise only traditional Chinese files written with BIG5 code. It cannot show simplified Chinese files correctly which use GB code. As a consequence, programmers have had to develop softwars that are able to convert between the BIG5 and GB encoding systems.
However, such conversions can meet only the needs of individual readings. They cannot be relied on for formal files in business and technology. There are several reasons for this. First, the vocabulary in the two lexical corpuses does not have one-to-one correspondence - that is, one simplified character may correspond with multiple traditional ones. Thus, the conversion should be corrected manually. Second, the standard of choosing characters is not the same for the two writing systems. Some rare characters can be recognised by only one of the encoding systems. Third, the terminology of certain fields and the translation of foreign Lexis are to some extent different in the two writing systems. No software can perform such a transformation.
Converting flies from one encoding system to the other requires almost the same amount of work as does conventional proofreading of translation.

How do we determine which version of written Chinese is appropriate for our clients' target market?

If the target audience is in mainland China, translations will be rendered either in simplified Chinese or the GB encoding system. If the target market is a region outside of the Chinese mainland, traditional Chinese and the BIG5 encoding system will be used.

If the translation needs to be colloquial - for instance, translating a training handbook for salesmen - the process becomes more complex, because the language habits of different regions have to be taken into consideration. For example, the word 'stamp' should be translated as if the target market is the Chinese mainland or Taiwan. However, in Chinese communities in North America, it is often translated as , which resembles its English pronunciation. Consequently, translated documents must employ the language customs and styles of the target market --- this is true for translations into Chinese as well as into English (such as American English, British English, or Australian English.)

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