CHINESE MANDARIN
When you are assigning your Chinese translators to handle an “English to Mandarin Translation” project, do you know what exactly is the “MANDARIN” (sometimes written as "Mandarine", probably a typo form) language? What is the difference between “Mandarin” and “Chinese language”? Is it the “Simplified Chinese” or “Traditional Chinese”? For which market does this “language” best fit?
Chinese Mandarin, nowadays, is the official "State Language" spoken in Mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore, where most people communicate for their daily life in this tongue, just like the English in the UK and United States. ACE CHINESE TRANSLATION (A.C.T.) is based in Mainland China. Most of our schools, colleges & universities are teaching their courses in Mandarin, and the TV shows, movies and radio stations are also dominated by this language. Over 75% of the population in China can speak it fluently, while over 99% can understand you if you talk in this language. Worth mentioning is that it's also one of the 6 Official Working Languages for the United Nations. In China and Taiwan Province, we call "Mandarin" as "普通话" ("Pu Tong Hua", which literally means "Common Language") or sometimes "国语" ("Guo Yu", which literally means "National Language"), which gives you a basic hint about its status in the country. . There is huge population of 850 million people worldwide speaking this language as their native tongue, easily making it the most spoken lingua franca on our planet.
Mandarin - "Standard Language" for All Chinese Speaking Communities?
No, not every Chinese person speaks Mandarin. By 2015, only 70% of the Chinese population in China are capable of speaking Mandarin fluently. There are about 400 million people are only capable of comprehending by listening for unilateral communication. As planned by the Implementation Plan for Popularization of National Common Language and Script, the common language and script will be fundamentally popularized nationwide by 2020, meaning that 80% or more of the population will be capable of speaking it with proficiency.
There are many dialects or even different languages in many places within China where the local people may find it difficult to speaking fluent or smooth common Chinese language, especially in Tibet, Xinjiang and some remote areas in northeast China. Many minority ethnic groups have their own linguistic system.
Natives of Hong Kong and Macau speak Cantonese, but they also learn Mandarin nowadays. Cantonese is also the dialect of Guangdong. However, many mandarin-speaking people have swarmed into Guangdong to work and settle down as a result of economic development and population migration, hence the widespread of this common language in Guangdong.
Simply put, at least 70% of the population are capable of speaking mandarin fluently, and at least 99% of listening comprehension. Still, this means that if you wish to learn Chinese, choose Mandarin as the version you will go with.
For translation / interpretation, shall I say - Chinese? or Mandarin?
You got some documents / materials in English (or other source languages) and you want to get them to the eyes of the people speaking Chinese / Mandarin. What should you request from a translator / translation agency? Should you say "please translate my English documents into Chinese" or "I need to get this translated into Mandarin"? Either will be fine.
PS: By the end of year 2016, China's GDP saw an increase by 6.7% on year-on-year basis and crossed the milestone of 70 Trillion Yuan. Precisely China's GDP in year 2016 was recorded at 74,412,700 billion Yuan, the per capita GDP being 55,412 Yuan (equivalent to 8,866 USD), which is 69th in a global ranking. This is a market that you shouldn't miss. :-)
The term "Mandarin" and "Chinese" are used interchangeably in translation scenario.
"Chinese", when it refers to the language, is indicating the most common speech spoken in China, which might include many different dialects and written scripts. Mandarin, to some degree, can be considered the representative of modern Chinese language. In most cases, if a Chinese person asks you "do you speak Chinese", he is actually asking "do you speak Mandarin".
In today's translation & localization industry, Mandarine usually refers to Simplified Chinese, if you don't specifically request otherwise. In our daily practice, a client requesting for "English to Mandarin translation" is usually asking for "English to Simplified Chinese translation", while one requesting for Cantonese translation is usually demanding for Traditional Chinese.
Why Choose us as Your Choice Mandarin Translators
Native or not - this might be the first and foremost thing to check up about a translator when you need to find someone to take care of your language translation tasks. Professional translators shall only translate into their mother tongue! Being Chinese-native ensures a thorough knowledge and mastery of the Chinese culture. This is industry-golden-standard and you should definitely insist on it. No matter how well someone knows Mandarin - as a SECOND language, they almost never achieve native linguistic and cultural fluency. A good translation demands more than just your linguistic skills - It also requires adequate cultural adaptation that only a native speaker can provide. A good Chinese translation should never sound like a "translation" – it should read just like it was originally composed in the source language itself.
ACE CHINESE TRANSLATION (www.actranslation.com), as this name tells, we are a SINGLE LANGUAGE VENDOR focusing on only one target language - Chinese (with several variants including Mandarin, Cantonese, Simplified, Traditional). Our working language is English+Chinese. This simple fact sets up far apart from all other MLVs who also offer Chinese translation services - actually many of them outsource their translation works to us.
Linguists and translators are bridges between different cultures, and languages are at the core of the business. The staff members of employees of ACT are all native Chinese speakers, and they together have built a strong team of in-house and freelance translators ready to act on your translation projects. The highly professional and talented language experts and specialists including translators, localizers, editors, independent proofreaders and final-eye polishers are working together closely in tandem to optimize the final output quality.
In the past decade we had successfully handled and delivered over 10,000 big and small Chinese translation projects with over 10 million words in total to our clients' satisfaction. Let us take care of your language needs as well:
MANDARIN vs. CANTONESE
They are two SPOKEN styles/dialects of Chinese language. As an official spoken “dialect”, Mandarin is widely used in Mainland China, Taiwan area and Singapore. Cantonese is specifically targeted to HK audience only.
Is it the Simplified or Traditional? There is not a certain correct answer if you want to be ACADEMICALLY precise. But we are not scholars studying histories and written text forms - we are translators. Let me give you a straight and easy answer – Translation into Mandarin means translation into “Simplified Chinese for Mainland Readers”.
Wish to learn more? Take some time to read this indepth article: Differences between Mandarin & Cantonese.
MANDARIN in China:
In Mainland China, we don’t have this exact word. Instead, we call this official dialect as “Pu Tong Hua”, which means the “common/standard language” in English. Where does this word “MANDARIN” come from? There is saying that the pronunciation of this word sounds like “Man Da Ren” in Chinese, which indicates the “Officials of Qing Dynasty”. However, this saying is only a saying for foreigners – the word “MANDARIN” in its English form basically means nothing to normal Chinese people who do not speak English. (Sounds strange? Normal Chinese people don’t know what is “MANDARIN” while many English-speaking people like you understand that it’s the official language spoken in China. Well, we have our own word for that, the “Pu Tong Hua”.)
Interested in more comparison between Mandarin & Cantonese, and the comparison between Simplified Chinese & Traditional Chinese? Check this article of ours.
KNOWLEDGE ZONE :
Origin and Standardization of Mandarin Language
Mandarin is the normalized modern Chinese lingua franca which is "standardized" on the basis on Beijing pronunciation, northern China dialects and the grammar rules of typical modern literatures written in modern vernacular Chinese. As one of the official languages of UN, it's an important bridge for cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries and the unquestionable preferred language for foreigners who wish to learn Chinese.
It's only one of the many different Chinese dialects?
The societie of the Han people had, historically, undergone several drastic cycles of division and unification, from which many dialects came into being due to many reasons such as long history of small-scale peasant economy, societal division and separation, population migration, obstruction of natural barriers social and other historical and geographical aspects as well as imbalanced development of languages, mutual contradiction and influence between different languages and other linguistic aspects.
There are many dialects in modern Chinese with vast distributions. They are different in many ways such as pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, especially pronunciation.
Chinese dialects can be divided into two categories: official dialect and Six southern dialects. Never treated as official languages, other southern dialects had been degrading and disappearing due to lack of standards except Hakka dialect, southern Hokkien dialect, Cantonese and northern Wu dialects. Except Hokkien dialect and Cantonese that preserve many traits of ancient Chinese, these dialects may be correspondent with Guangyun as descendent of medieval Chinese. Hakka dialect and Gan dialect are mostly descendant of the medieval Chinese of the Northern Dynasties, while Wu dialect and Hunan Dialect might be descendent of the medieval Chinese of the Southern Dynasties.
Let's Talk About the "Tones"
Here it comes again, the "tones", one of the most "dreadful" and mistery challenge faced by many language learners trying to mastery the speech of this oriental language.
As a tonal language, Chinese has four tones, the first high and level, the second rising moderately, the third falling before rising and the fourth starting out high but dropping sharply to the bottom. There are only 3 tones in English, rising, falling and level, in addition to strong and weak stresses. Some Chinese people tend to speak English with rises and falls as in mandarin. Mandarin differentiates character pronunciation through the relative pitches of vowel (sometimes consonants). Such character pitches are also called tones, or character tones, used to differentiates pitches.
Often you will hear Chinese people greeting:
Nǐ Hǎo! ("Hello" in Chinese "PinYin", sounding like "Nee-How").
Both of these two "characters" are in third tone, which requires the pitch contour going down before rising up again. Do you want to give it a try?
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As a China-based SLV, we pride ourselves on being one of the leading suppliers of top quality English to Mandarin Chinese translation & localization services.
Yes we are top English to Mandarin translators. At ACE CHINESE TRANSLATION, we are skilled to translate English into Mandarin. We have good quality English Mandarin Dictionary. Of course, as we are experienced professional human translators with mother tongue being Chinese Mandarin, what you will get is definitely more than an English Mandarin Dictionary can offer!
Now, contact us and see how we will satisfy your English to Mandarin Chinese translation needs.