Starting A Business In China - Part 1: Language

These days everyone is talking about China using superlatives: the world’s fastest growing economy, most populated country, largest foreign reserve, biggest Internet population, most cell phone users, home of four of the world’s ten largest banks by market capitalization, etc, etc. Yours may be one of the many companies rushing into China to try to share in the growing prosperity. To paraphrase former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, “If I’m selling to you, I speak your language. If I’m buying, 那您定要说中文.[1]” Before you can start selling in China, you need to get a lot of translation done: company name, marketing materials, website, packaging, manuals, etc. Translators will tell you that translating into Chinese is more complex than translating into many other languages (say German). Terms like Cantonese, Mandarin, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese can be confusing; and since one Chinese character looks pretty much like another, it is hard to tell whether you are really getting good quality for your money. This article is not going to solve all your translation problems, but it will help you gain a better understanding of the issues involved so that you can at least ask your translators the right questions, and impress your colleagues at the same time.

Background on the Chinese Language

Chinese characters are ideographic, meaning that each character represents an idea (and not its pronunciation as in an English word). No one can say for sure how many characters there are, though one of the modern dictionaries collected over 85,000 characters. Most Chinese can only recognize a few thousand and a thousand characters vocabulary is usually considered sufficient to read a newspaper. A Chinese character is not equivalent to an English word, since most ideas are expressed with a number of characters. For example, 人 is a person, 人类 is mankind, 人民 means people, 男人 is a male person (man), 女人 is a female person (woman), and so on. As a general rule of thumb, a 1,000-word article in English will be translated into approximately 1,800 Chinese characters.

After the Communist Party took over China in 1949, the government undertook a program to simplify the characters by reducing the number of strokes. This resulted in a dramatic increase in the overall literacy rate. These character forms are now known as Simplified Chinese. The Kuomintang (or Nationalist Party) that fled to Taiwan maintained the traditional forms of the characters, now known as Traditional Chinese. For example, China is 中國 in Traditional Chinese and 中国 in Simplified Chinese (only one of the two characters was simplified). Besides China, Simplified Chinese is also used in Singapore. Traditional Chinese is also used in Hong Kong and Macau. The Chinese community in Malaysia uses both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Since a character usually does not give any indication of its pronunciation, different parts of China may pronounce the same character differently, giving rise to dialects. The most common dialects are: Mandarin, the official dialect for China and Taiwan; Cantonese, spoken in southern China, Hong Kong, and most Chinatowns around the world; and Fujianese, or Hokkien, spoken in the Fujian province, and parts of Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan. Each dialect can also have its own unique characters, terms, or sentence structures. Fortunately, these unique characters, terms, and structures are not used in formal written Chinese (similar to most written English not using Ebonics words). So while someone from Beijing may not understand the speakers at a press conference in Hong Kong, he will have no problem reading the press release. Unless you need to have an accurate transliteration of your company’s name, find an interpreter for a business meeting, or produce audio soundtracks for video clips, you really do not need to be too concerned about the dialects.

[1] No, Willy Brandt did not speak Chinese; Kevin Rudd of Australia remains the first and only western political leader to speak the language. What Willy Brandt actually said was “If I'm selling to you, I speak your language. If I'm buying, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen.”

Part 2: What is in a Name