Chinese: The Trickiest Language To Learn And Its Effects On The Challenges Of Chinese Translation

To begin with there really isn't any one single Chinese language. There are a number of languages that are home to China which are completely different from each other. While two languages like Ukrainian and Chinese, or Spanish and Italian, hold a number of similarities and are largely intelligible to each other, this doesn't hold true when it comes to the various languages that were born within China. However in general when people speak about the Chinese language they are speaking about Mandarin Chinese, so let's focus on that one. Mandarin Chinese translation is difficult enough as is without considering all the other potentially relevant languages.

One of the biggest difficulties when it comes to the Chinese language and its complexity is the fact that there is a significant amount of tension between the language as it is spoken compared to the language as it is written. A big reason for this is the fact that the Chinese spoken language has changed significantly and continues to evolve and grow and adapt, taking on new characteristics and losing others as time goes on, while the written Chinese language has not changed to quite the same degree. To oversimplify the issue even further for the sake of brevity, over the lifespan of the Chinese language its spoken component has changed more rapidly and more significantly than its written component.

The written language of Chinese also plays such a significantly difficult role in Chinese translation due to its most apparent characteristics- written Chinese is still heavily indebted to and in entrenched within the nation's earliest hieroglyphics. While many other world languages have adopted a more pared down alphabet revolving around the combination of letters, the Chinese system of writing still revolves at least partially around a system of somewhat abstracted pictographs. This statement once again oversimplifies the point as there is a system of phonics within the written Chinese language, but overall the difference between written English and written Chinese is SIGNIFICANTLY different than written English and written Spanish, or even written English and a language that utilizes a different alphabet such as written Russian.

All of this is to say nothing about the many other significant differences between the languages, such as the importance of tonality as it ascribes to meaning within the different languages, the differences of grammar, etc.

Overall due to the difficulty of the Chinese language it is far better to simply hire on a professional to perform Chinese to English translation for you than it is to attempt to learn and understand the language within a very short period of time. Learning the Chinese language to the degree where you'll be able to produce a clear and accurate translation requires a truly significant amount of time, and unless you choose to learn the language for your own purposes it's almost always better to stick with a qualified and trained Chinese translator from a translation agency.

Charlene Lacandazo is a marketing executive for Rosetta Translation, a leading full-service translation agency in London, UK.

Rosetta Translation specialises in Chinese translation worldwide.

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