Chinese: Translation & conference interpreting

Standard Chinese (based on the Beijing dialect Mandarin) is the official language in China and Taiwan as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is also one of six official languages of the United Nations. More than one billion people speak Mandarin Chinese, making it the most widely spoken language in the world.

Mandarin is the native language of most Chinese people, but other (Chinese) languages, such as Cantonese, are spoken as well. A total of 292 different languages and dialects are recognized in China.

Chinese belongs to the Sinitic languages of the Sino-Tibetan language family. In general, the term “Chinese language“ refers to the standard language Mandarin. There are nine other Chinese languages, and each of them has several dialects. Yet these dialects are to some extent so different from each other and from the standard language that communication between the dialect groups is only partly or not at all possible.

Therefore, when choosing a Chinese interpreter and translator, considerate has to be taken into consideration whether Standard Chinese or a dialect is being used and whether the language expert is fluent in the respective language variant. Obviously, the interpreter’s and translator’s experience and competence also play an important role here. Thus, finding the right specialist translator or interpreter for Chinese can cost a lot of time and energy and still go wrong in the worst case. That’s why it is always advisable to consult AP Fachübersetzungen, the Nuremberg language service that is renowned far beyond the borders of Bavaria: we conduct all the necessary research to guarantee optimal communication and translation for you. In the case of certified translations, we only use reliable, publicly appointed and sworn Chinese translators for legal documents. Our best and friendly court, consecutive, liaison, conference and simultaneous interpreters will be pleased to support you. With us, your interpreting and translation projects are always in good hands.

The Chinese language is a very old language and can look back on a writing tradition of three thousand years. The development of the Chinese language is roughly divided into the periods of Old Chinese (11^th to 3^rd century BC), Middle Chinese (2^nd century BC to 14^th century) and modern and contemporary Chinese starting from the 15^th century.

Obviously, not only the language itself developed further, but also its writing. The writing and its pronunciation often present a big challenge, especially for non-native speakers. Thomas Wade and Herbert A. Giles, who developed the Wade-Giles system in the 19^th century, were already aware of this. This system introduced a Latin spelling of the Chinese letters based on their phonology and thus made it easier for non-native speakers to learn the Chinese pronunciation rules. Since the 1980s, however, Pinyin has become the international standard for the phonetic transcription of Mandarin Chinese.

The Chinese language uses Chinese writing, in which every morpheme is generally represented by a separate sign. For Chinese, this means that a monosyllabic phonetic value is given to each sign since Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic. This leads to the number of up to 90,000 letters, which is high compared to the English writing system. According to some counting methods, there are even up to 105,000 letters, of which, however, only 3,000 to 5,000 are used in everyday language.

There is no uniform Chinese writing. The writing system used in the People’s Republic of China and that used in Hong Kong differ from each other.

The word order in Chinese is relatively fixed since the position in a sentence also expresses the relations between words. Chinese has no articles, cases or pronouns.

Moreover, unlike English, the Chinese language is a tonal language, which means that the tone pitch flow has an effect on the meaning of a word.

Due to all these special features of the Chinese language, it is advisable to entrust the Chinese translation of your specialist texts or interpretation to a native speaker or very experienced language expert. At AP Fachübersetzungen, we work exclusively with certified and experienced Chinese translators and specialist interpreters to ensure the high quality and accuracy of your translation with certification and offer interpreting services of every degree of complexity.