Chinese Mandarin Translation Service

A Dependable Back-Office for All Your English<>Mandarin Language Works.

Nǐ Hǎo! ("Hello" in Mandarin Chinese "Pin-Yin", pronounced as "Nee-How").

As an established CHINESE LANGUAGE SERVICE team headquartered in the hinterland CHINA, the Mandarin linguists at ACE CHINESE TRANSLATION are NATIVE in this target language and highly professional to deliver top quality MANDARIN TRANSLATION and localization services!

IMPORTANT: We are a Single Language Vendor (S.L.V.) company for only ONE target language - Chinese (Including Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Sichuanese, Simplified, Traditional, etc)!

Mandarin is the official "Standard Chinese" language spoken by majority of the Chinese population (1.3 billion people) today. We elaborately chooses to dedicate our strength into this ONE single target language, instead of going diversified with over 100 language pairs as many other translation houses do. CHOOSE US for your Chinese language translation needs!

__________________________________________________________

Basic Facts Shared by Your Mandarin Translators

Mandarin is the official language spoken in Mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore. Over 75% of the population in China can speak it fluently, while over 99% can understand you if you talk in this language. In China and Taiwan Province, people refer "Mandarin" as "Pu Tong Hua" ( meaning "Common Language" literally) or sometimes "Guo Yu" ( meaning "National Language" literally ), which gives you a basic hint about its status in the country.

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.

Mandarin is a common and general language used not only by the modern Han ethnics, but also by many other ethnic groups in China as a major language for communication. Popularization of a "common language" is beneficial in many ways, especially so for such a giant country as China with so vast a territory, so large a population and so many different ethnic groups, languages, dialects and writing systems. It is helpful for communication between peoples and regions, establishment of a united market, unification and cohesion of the whole nation, etc.

Mandarin Translation - Target for All Chinese People?

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.

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.

We usually divide languages in the world into two major categories: tonal languages and intonational languages. Chinese belongs to the former with the tones firstly expressed by the rise and fall in pitch of pronunciation of the same syllables. Sentence has its unique tone different from single characters. English is an intonational language with different tones for pitch changes, its length is comparable to length of words, phrases or sentences.

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.

You may have noticed that at the begining of this article, I wrote:

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?

Tone is the major challenge for foreigners to learn Chinese. Tones are used to differentiate the meanings and characters, and even the same tones can be correspondent with different characters. Many foreigners whose mother languages are not tonal language will face great challenges when learning Chinese. Sometimes, establishing a clear concept of tones might be the first step to learn Chinese.

 

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.
.

 

____________________________________________

We translate from your language into Chinese Mandarin - Our Mother Tongue

WHY are we the best team for you to engage for your Chinese translation needs? Because we are professional, experienced and quality oriented native Chinese translators, proofreaders, polishers and DTP specialists, all working under one same roof as a solid S.L.V. team! We understand that "Mandarin Translation" is not simply a matter of finding out equivalent Chinese words with similar concepts, but of deciding on appropriate ways of conveying the true meanings in mandarine language.

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:

 

Extended Reading:

Top Quality Mandarin Translators
Native Speaking Cantonese Translators
English<>Chinese Translation & Localization
Hire Best China-based Chinese Translators