World Translation Center can provide professional Mandarin translation services for English to Mandarin and Mandarin to English. We can also translate Mandarin to and from over 130 other languages, including all the principal languages of Europe, Asia, South America, the Middle East and a wide range of African languages, at competitive prices.
Our Mandarin specialists will be able to provide translation for virtually any project you might have, including marketing materials, technical, financial, legal and medical documents, websites and software. Our skilled project managers will match your project with a translator team best suited for the area of expertise needed. Every linguist works exclusively in his or her own mother tongue and within his or her area of expertise guaranteeing not only quality translation, but proper localization as well. After each document is translated, it will be edited and proofread by another professional translator to assure maximum quality.
We also make available transcription, video recording and subtitling services. In the event that you need to have an existing video dubbed, a commercial narrated or a telephone system recorded, our native Mandarin speakers are available to provide high quality voiceover services.
We pride ourselves in delivering high quality cost-effective services, whether your project is small or large, simple or highly complex.
Mandarin Information
Simplified Mandarin, or simplified Chinese, is officially used in Mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia and the United Nations.
Mandarin Language FactsAround 1950, in an attempt to increase literacy in China, the government of the People's Republic of China started to simplify their way of writing Chinese characters and thus created the language, which is now called “simplified Mandarin”. By doing so, two different versions of written Chinese were created: traditional Chinese, which is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and simplified Chinese. These are easy for the native speaker to tell apart.
The simplified writing system is different from the traditional writing system by using less numbers of strokes per character and by reducing the amount of characters. Just slightly over 50% of the population of China is able to speak Mandarin. In China's cities, about 66% speak Mandarin, while only 45% speak it in the countryside. Around 70% of people between the ages of 15 and 29 speak the language, while only 30% of those over 60 can speak it.Written Chinese is based on spoken Mandarin and is known as "hŕnyŭ" or "zhōngwén". Speakers of other varieties of Chinese have to learn the grammar and vocabulary of Mandarin in order to read and write in Chinese.
Chinese people speak by character (a Chinese character is pronounced as short as an English syllable) and only around 150-200 characters can be spoken in a minute. European speakers, on the other hand, speak about 100 words per minute. This fact is important when you consider transcribing audio files.
World Voice Center offers translation and voice recording in China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Writing Mandarin
Mandarin uses special character fonts which most computers display properly. However, if formatting is involved, Chinese requires a Chinese operating system to display the font properly. Translated text will be delivered in PDF, formatted files in high resolution PDF ready to print.
The Chinese language does not have an alphabet. The English word "alphabet" comes from the Greek letters alpha and beta.
Alphabets are phonetic systems where the individual sounds of the language are represented with letters. Letters are symbols which only have phonetic values and do not mean anything by themselves. The letters in a word have to be read together and vocalized, either aloud or mentally, in order to be understood as a concept.
Chinese writing developed as a system where each symbol represents a concept. Sound sometimes plays a role in the construction of a symbol. The first written characters developed from the drawing of certain objects; for example: the drawn symbol of a horse identified a horse. This system quickly became much more complex and the majority of the symbols today do not have such a direct link between shape and meaning. However, common in most of them is that they represent a concept and not a sound. There are only a few symbols that stand for a sound only.
The nice thing about an alphabet is that there are only a few letters to memorize. The number of letters varies with each language but it is usually below 50. The number of Chinese symbols, however, is much larger. A person must know at least 3,000 characters to be able to read a newspaper. Small dictionaries contain approximately 6,000 characters, but larger ones have as many as 40-50,000 characters.
Screen text for videos will be delivered in .eps or .psd format as shown here:
