Chinese to English Translation

Do not translate character by character

Chinese is a wonderfully succinct language: often just a couple of characters can express in Chinese what would need a phrase or sometimes even a sentence in English. This can cause major difficulties in Chinese to English translation. When you translate documents, you need to unpack the meaning of Chinese characters carefully.

The best way to do that is to read the whole sentence before you translate it and try to understand the meaning and the role each character plays. If you translate Chinese to English word for word, you cannot do it adequately, as, for instance, just one character added at the end of a phrase can have a lot of influence on the meaning of the previous ones.

Pay attention to different language structures

Chinese and English are structurally very different languages. Compared to English, Chinese has, in some respect, ‘less grammar’: there are no tenses, no articles, words are not usually marked for the plural form, etc. This may be a cause for learners to celebrate because it makes learning Chinese a little easier. However, it makes Chinese to English translation even more challenging.

Such ideas as time are expressed in Chinese not through auxiliaries and verb inflections, but through the word order, adverbials, the context. To adequately translate Chinese to English, you must pay attention to this and do your best to use the right English equivalents.

Never use machine translation

With all its subtleties, Chinese is one of the most difficult languages for machine translation. Even the simplest phrases can be misinterpreted. To have the best Chinese to English translation possible, work with expert translations. Experts at our transition company in Singapore can translate Chinese to English offering the best results.  As the Top translation agency in Asia Pacific, we also translate from Vietnamese, Thai, Malay, Tamil, Chinese, Japanese and Korean to English as these are popular Asian languages. 

The world language

With over 900 million native speakers and around 1.1 billion speakers in total, Chinese is one of the world’s most spoken languages. It is also a serious competitor for English, that has been considered the language of the world for a few decades now.

English is not likely to give up its place completely, but it is ‘moving aside’ to give some place to other languages, Chinese being one of them. For example, just around a decade ago, 80% of all the information on the Internet was in English. Nowadays, English has only 32% of the Internet ‘pie’, while Chinese has around 33%.

With the growing global significance of the Chinese economy and the Chinese market, Chinese is becoming a more important language for business. This also creates a higher demand for Chinese to English translation.

The oldest writing system

Chinese has the most ancient writing system of all the languages spoken today – it is over 3000 years old. The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese script discovered are the inscriptions carved on bronze vessels and oracle bones from the late Shang dynasty, dated around 1200 BCE.  In contrast to that, the Latin alphabet used in the English language was developed only around 7 century CE.

Over the course of history, Chinese characters have undergone many changes, including official reforms carried out by various governments. The characters we see today are quite different from their ancient predecessors but they have a long and complicated history.