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Chinese

Cantonese, as the language of Chinese settlers in North America and elsewhere, is the dialect best known in the United States. Mandarin, as the official language of the mainland and Taiwan of PRC and as one of the official languages of Singapore, is the most widespread of the dialects.
The vast majority of the Chinese-speaking population is in the mainland of China (more than 980 million), Hong Kong, and Taiwan (19 million), but substantial numbers are also found throughout the Southeast Asia, especially in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Important Chinese-speaking communities are also found in many other parts of the world, especially in Europe, North and South America and the Hawaiian Islands.

Two written forms - traditional and simplified Chinese
Chinese is written with thousands of distinctive characters called as ideographs. These characters consist of two elements -a signified element that indicates the meaning of a word and a phonetic element that indicates the sound.
About 40 years ago the new government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) made the decision of simplifying the written Chinese language to make it easier for the general populace to become literate. Thus two distinct versions of written Chinese coexisted: traditional and simplified Chinese, easy to be identified for native speakers.

Simplified characters are used in the PRC and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.

The simplified writing system is different from the traditional writing system on two aspects: (a) a reduction of quantity of strokes per character; and (b) a reduction of quantity of characters in common use (two different characters are now written with the same character).

The simplified and traditional Chinese are only variants of written Chinese, but it is of no surprise in finding that those who read only traditional Chinese do not know what the simplified Chinese means, and vice versa. So, it is of importance in Chinese translation to decide if the simplified or traditional Chinese can be used in a particular target market.

There is no difference between the basic vocabularies or grammatical structures of simplified and traditional Chinese. However, as a result of the limits to the communication between mainland China (using simplified Chinese) and Taiwan, Hong Kong and the overseas areas (using traditional Chinese), some differences still exist in terminology, especially new cultural or technological nouns. For example, the English computer phrase "open a file" is commonly translated in simplified Chinese as , while in traditional Chinese it is .

What is the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin? How are they related to traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese?
Mandarin is the key Chinese language while the Cantonese is just one of the Chinese dialects. In mainland China and Taiwan, vast majority of population can speak Mandarin and Cantonese is only spoken in China's Guangdong Province and Hong Kong. In North America, most Chinese immigrants came from Guangdong and Hong Kong of PRC. That’s why the Cantonese is more popular among overseas Chinese.

It is to be noted that the Chinese character reform is only related to the transcription of Chinese instead of the language itself. In other words, the traditional and simplified Chinese are only variants of the written forms, whereas Mandarin and Cantonese are related to its spoken form. They should not be confounded that the Mandarin is not as same as the simplified Chinese.

Coding systems for Chinese documents
One of the problems in Chinese computing is the variety of internal encodings used to represent Chinese characters. The most common one is the national standard (GB) and Big5 or Big-5.

Guobiao orGuojia Biaozhun Ma (..) the National Standard of the People's Republic of China, is the encoding method for written simplified characters.
Big5 or Big-5 or Dawu Ma (..) is the encoding method for written traditional Characters.

Both GB and BIG5 encoding systems are used for computers in China, wherein GB has been developed by Mainland China and BIG5 by Taiwan.

Is it possible to convert files between the GB and BIG5 encoding systems?
Computers with a traditional Chinese Windows system can identify traditional Chinese files written with BIG5 code only but cannot display simplified Chinese files precisely which use GB code. Resultantly, programmers have to develop software capable of conversion between the BIG5 and GB encoding systems.
However, such conversion can meet only the needs of individual in readings but cannot be relied on for formal files in business and technology. Regarding that, there are several reasons. Firstly, the vocabulary in the two lexical corpuses does not have one-to-one equivalence - that is, one simplified character may be equivalent with multiple traditional ones. As a result, the conversion must be corrected manually. Secondly, the standard for choosing characters is not same for the two writing systems. Some seldom used characters fail to be identified by only one of the encoding systems. Thirdly, the terminology of certain area and the translation of foreign Lexis are to some extent different in the two writing systems. No software can perform such a conversion.
Converting flies from one encoding system to another requires almost the same amount of work as regular proofreading of translation does.

How do we determine which version of written Chinese is appropriate for our clients' target market?

In case the target audience is in the mainland of China, translations will be conducted either in simplified Chinese or the GB encoding system. If elsewhere, the traditional Chinese and the BIG5 encoding system will be used.

If the translation is required to be colloquial, for example, translating a training manual for salesmen, the process will get more complex as , because the language habits in different regions have to be considered as well. For example, the word 'stamp' should be translated as if the target market is the Chinese mainland or Taiwan. However, in Chinese communities in North America, it is often translated into , similar to its English pronunciation. Resultantly, the translated documents must employ the language customs and styles of the target market --- this is true for translations into Chinese as well as into English (such as American English, British English, or Australian English.)