30 Years of Expertise in Trusted Chinese Translation Services
Chinese has the most speakers of any language in the world, spoken by over 1 billion people. There are numerous varieties of both written and spoken Chinese – some linguists cite several hundred – that are sometimes considered to be entirely separate languages, since many are mutually unintelligible.
Chinese is spoken in the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as by large numbers of Chinese emigrants all over the globe. Due to these Chinese-speaking areas’ economic importance, translation into Chinese is an immensely powerful asset for businesses looking to expand their global reach and trade with eastern Asia.
At Business Language Services, we have been reliably translating to and from Chinese for over 30 years and have an expert team of linguists covering all major varieties
Chinese translations in just four simple steps!
Quick, Simple and Reliable: Chinese Translations Made Easy
Our translation services are designed to make the entire process – from getting a quote to delivering high-quality translations – as simple and seamless as possible:
Our Translation Services
We offer a wide range of language services involving Chinese, including:
Document Translations
Interpreting Services
Multimedia Translations
Chinese localisation
Certified Translations
Regional variation in Chinese
Spoken Chinese is typically classified into seven dialect groups, of which Mandarin is by far the most common, accounting for around two thirds of first-language speakers.
- Mandarin, including Standard Chinese, the Beijing dialect, Sichuanese and Dungan (spoken in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and parts of Russia)
- Wu, including Shanghainese, Suzhounese and Wenzhounese
- Gan
- Xiang
- Min, including Fuzhounese, Hainanese, Hokkien (aka Taiwanese) and Teochew
- Hakka
- Yue, including Cantonese and Taishanese
Some linguists and scholars also distinguish three additional groups:
- Jin, sometimes included in Mandarin
- Huizhou, sometimes included in Wu
- Pinghua, sometimes included in Yue
These variants differ greatly and are generally considered to be mutually unintelligible. However, they form a dialect continuum, meaning that each variety may be partially intelligible with its closest geographical neighbours, with the level of similarity decreasing as distance increases.
This means that there is much debate among linguists as to whether these varieties should be considered dialects of the macrolanguage, Chinese, or individual languages in their own right.
Written Chinese also has two forms: Simplified characters and Traditional characters. Simplified characters are used in the People’s Republic of China, Malaysia and Singapore, while Traditional characters are used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, in addition to many overseas Chinese-speaking communities.
These character sets can be used to write any of the spoken varieties, so the same piece of text in Traditional characters will look very different in Taiwan and Hong Kong, for example.
Pricing and quotations
Translations to and from Chinese start from just £84.00 (£70.00 + VAT).
This includes most texts up to around 500–600 words/characters, depending on the service(s) requested.
We will always analyse your source text(s) and consider the scope and complexity of your project to provide you with the most cost-effective quote possible to meet your needs.
We can typically return straightforward translations of up to 2,000 words/characters the next working day.
