The Chinese language is spoken by about one-fifth of the world’s population, with over 1 billion people speaking some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as “languages” or “dialects” is controversial.
Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, though all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most populous (by far) is Mandarin (c. 850 million), followed by Wu (c. 90 million), Min (c. 70 million) and Cantonese (c. 70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, though some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple “languages” or as “dialects” of a single language is a contentious issue.
The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/Guoyu), based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Min Nan, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia and is known as Hokkien).
Chinese Translation Services
Corporate Translations provide professional Chinese language translation services to the companies all over the UK, Europe and China. With offices based in Essex near London, we are a long-established professional UK business language translation agency. If your business requires an English to Chinese or Chinese to English translation service we have a large database of fully trained professional translators with expertise in multiple markets industries. Our expertise covers business, legal, financial, technical, medical, media and website translations. You can view our main areas of translation expertise here.
For more information please click Chinese translation service
Chinese Typesetting Services
Our services don’t just stop at translating for you. We can provide out Chinese typesetting services which includes brochures, business cards, stationery and packaging labels. We understand what is required when typesetting for foreign languages and are skilled with being able to adapt designs and layouts to accommodate the translated copy. We have access to hundreds of fonts and follow your English design layout as much as the script allows
For more information on our Chinese typesetting DTP services please contact us.
Below are a selection of some of the main languages we provide translation services for:
