Right Kiwis. After more than 20 years living in various places in Asia, and more than 10 years running a translation business, I am constantly amazed at the lack of knowledge Kiwis have on foreign languages. So forgive me for preaching, but time to issue some lessons.
Lesson #1. Mandarin is a spoken language, NOT a written one.
Given the FTA with China and the focus on both selling to China and receiving Chinese investment, I am constantly gob-smacked by the general lack of knowledge in NZ about the Chinese language.
I constantly get asked for a translation from English to Mandarin, the assumption being there is one written language for all Chinese speakers.
Guess, what? We cannot translate to Mandarin. No-one can. Mandarin is a spoken language, not a written one.
Yes, Mandarin is the official spoken language of mainland China (PRC) and Taiwan (ROC), as well as amongst the diaspora in Singapore, the USA, here in NZ etc. Note there are multiple dialects and separate languages as well such as Hakka, Pinghua, Cantonese etc. but most NZ exporters need not worry themselves with those as they will be focussed on translating their written materials.
Can I make it clear that Mandarin is NOT the name of a written language.
There are in fact two written scripts for Chinese, with one of them having two different main "flavors".
Script#1 - Traditional Chinese (TR-CN): This is the old script of Chinese, pre-Communist era. It is used in Taiwan (ROC), Hong Kong, Singapore, and amongst most of the older Chinese diaspora (some Chinese language newspapers in NZ use Traditional script).
Flavor: TR-CN-HK Variant: While in Hong Kong TR-CN is the core, there are some unique characters used in writing not used in Taiwan (in tune with the Cantonese spoken dialect). At the same time, colloquialisms, difference in phrasing etc. can mean a translation done for Taiwan may be inappropriate for Hong Kong, and vice versa.
Script#2 - Simplified Chinese (S-CN): after the revolution, the Communist party went about "rationalizing" the Chinese script (written language). They removed a lot of characters and made others much simpler to write and read, and introduced Pinyin; the use of Roman characters to represent Chinese sounds, whereby literacy went from <50% to almost 100% within 30 years (not a bad effort for one generation eh?). So "Simplified Chinese" is the script used in Mainland China (PRC).
So what is "Mandarin"?
Mandarin is the spoken language. So people from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore etc, can speak the same language, but they write their language differently. Kind of like I spell "colour" with a "u", but an American spells it "color" (no "u"), but on a whole different level. A person in China will say a word e.g. "Green", and a person in Taiwan will understand them. But they will both spell it differently (i.e. use different characters).
What does this mean for you preparing your materials for your Chinese speaking audience?
Well, first you have to decide where your audience is. Mainland China? Hong Kong? Taiwan? Where your audience is will decide what script you use. But note also that as languages stay apart, they diverge. So there are different "turns of phrase", different styles of saying things, different phraseology, so you need to have translators who are au fait with the current local lingo.
One word of warning. There are various software applications out there that claim to be able to convert Simplified to Traditional and vice versa. Few do it well, and they forget that as time progresses, the "style" of writing diverges. Use with caution.
Here ends Lesson #1. Like for Lesson #2: Malaysian vs Indonesian.
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