One Hour Translation Blog

Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese embody a considerable part of the American translation industry, particularly the West Coast. Also, despite the high potential of profit in translating those languages for commercial use, many professional translation firms and individual translation services have very little knowledge about Asian languages. Moreover, the complexity of these dialects is also a good reason why human translation is a must when translating anything and machine translation is at best left as an assistance tool.

Asian Languages Prefer Simplicity over Verbosity

Eastern languages usually eschew the linguistic tools that their western … Continue Reading

Many marketers contact us asking for Chinese translations for their collaterals, brochures etc. When we ask them questions like:

1. Which Chinese dialect?
2. What type of characters?
3. Where exactly your recipients live in China?

they are a bit surprised, and don’t know the answers.

A few (interesting) tips that can help:

1. The Chinese translator must be a native speaker of the specific Chinese dialect you’re interested in. For instance, Mandarin and Cantonese as different as French and German. Although many Mandarin translators are also familiar with Cantonese, they cannot be good translators in … Continue Reading