Chinese Translation Services in Malaysia

“Face” (“Mianzi” or 面子)is often a prized commodity and soft power within the Chinese community. Unfortunately, many translators, do not take it into account when providing Chinese translation Services. 

About ten years ago, we were asked to provide English to Chinese translation Services to translate an elaborate University Brochure for recruiting students from China. All went well until the words “boxer rebellion” was mentioned in the original English version. Being an experienced Chinese translation Services provider, who has served the Chinese market for a long time, we decided to translate the historical event with a more politically correct phrase, which was “boxer revolution”. As part of providing our Chinese translation Services, we explained to our clients the Chinese readers regard for the event as a revolution and referred the boxers as freedom fighters. The brochure was so well received that the student enrolment from China increased dramatically.

Depending on the nature of the document, other factors such as appropriate sentence structures, local Chinese terms and readers’ hierarchical status needs to be considered for English to Chinese translation Services to be properly provided.For political reasons, Chinese translation Services providers who wish to align the translation to readers in China would normally use simplified Chinese. Taiwanese publishers set themselves apart from the Chinese in China by continuing to write in Traditional Chinese characters.

In every scenario, the backdrop behind every English to Chinese translation Services that we provide is often focused on maintaining positive relationship (“Guanxi” or关系)between the writer and his or her readers.

How about Chinese translation Services which requires us to translate from Chinese to English? Yes, the reverse bring as different set of challenges. Normally, a Chinese character can exist in different forms and transforms into a verb, noun, adjective and others, according to the context it’s used. Therefore, the key to providing a good Chinese translation Services into the target English language is to understand what the writer is trying to say. 

Very often, Chinese translation Services a provider is caught up with the accuracy of the details. This often creates inconsistencies and illogical statements in the translation provided by the Chinese translation Services provider. 

Another possible mistake that a Chinese translation Services provider makes, is not taking into account common English terms and names while translating. It is important for every Chinese translation Services provider to consciously display common phrases, nouns and appropriate adjectives to allow readers to “digest” the message easily.

Although the above points may not bring to light all of the issues that a Chinese translation Services provider may face, but it does give some tips to those who wish to engage a Chinesetranslation Services provider.