Chinese Website Translation FAQ

Here are a list of the most frequently-asked questions about our Chinese website translation service, and Chinese websites in general.

A. This is a common misunderstanding. There are many spoken dialects of chinese, Mandarin being the official language of mainland china, and Cantonese being the language of the Canton provinces including Hong Kong and Macau. Although these two dialects (and others) are very different, the written language for the different chinese dialects is essentially the same. There are however two different styles of writing chinese characters, called traditional (as used in Hong Kong) and simplified (as used in mainland China). Simplified characters have less strokes and are easier to write. In general a web-site translation written in either style is readable by all Chinese people - however those in the mainland will in general prefer simplified, and those in Hong Kong and Taiwan will prefer the traditional style. It is up to you to decide which translation you require, or if you require both.

Q. Are there any issues where Mandarin or Cantonese language are important then?

A. Only if you have audio - for example if you have streaming video on your website with spoken chinese language. In these cases the simplest way to resolve it is for us to add Chinese character subtitles to your video once it is encoded for your website.

Q. Will my website be seen in China? Doesn't the government rigidly control the web?

A. Web restrictions in China are not necessarily as severe as are reported in the west. The government certainly does restrict access to certain sites for political reasons, some international news services have been affected. But the majority of commercial sites are unaffected and use of the internet in China is very widespread now for both commercial and individual use.

Q. Can you translate my site? It's running from a database using ASP scripts?

A. Yes. We can translate. Most modern databases can deal with chinese-language text entry and we have a great deal of experience with ASP, SQL Server and other associated technologies.

Q. Can you translate my site? It's using Perl and/or PHP and/or MySQL on linux/unix?

A. Yes, all these technologies have been proven to work well with websites designed for chinese-language. PHP and MySQL are used to power this website.

Q. What about text that is embedded in graphics? What about websites using Flash, Shockwave or Java?

A. We can deal with all of these - we have Chinese graphic designers, Flash experts and Java programmers who can help convert all components for your web pages, not just the HTML text.

Q. Will my webserver be able to encode chinese-language text web pages?

A. Yes - if you are using any of the more modern web servers, such as Microsoft's Internet Information Server 4 or 5 (IIS4, IIS5), Apache, or Netscape Enterprise Server. Servers from O'Reilly, Sun and Oracle also are known to support Chinese text. If you are unsure whether your server will support chinese-language then email your server information to us and we will send you a free report on its suitability for chinese language use.

Q. Do I have to give you full access to my site?

A. No. Although full access can make our life easier, we can work on individual files, fragments of files, or even from printouts / Word files, etc. to provide you with chinese language data files your own developers can include into your site. After that we would just need to check the chinese content to ensure it has been installed accurately.

Q. What do I do if people start sending us email in Chinese?

A. We offer an additional service to manage chinese-language communications for you. You forward any Chinese-language messages to us (or we set up an automatic address to forward these) and we will translate them, reply to any frequently asked questions (from a script you prepare for us) and forward all important information in english to the relevent people in your company.

Q. Should I translate my whole website?

A. Quite often you will not need to translate the whole website - think about what areas of your site are important for your chinese operations and which are not. Also remember which areas of your site get updated frequently - you will need to make a decision about what to do for future updates on frequently changing areas of your site.

Q. Who does your translations? Are they accurate?

A. Our translations are done entirely by people who speak Chinese as their first language, our translators are based in the UK, in Canada and in China. One of our translators, for example, used to teach english in Hong Kong. Our translations are checked and double-checked to ensure the best use of words. We frequently have to re-phrase text to suit the chinese audience. We will at all stages in the process liase with you to discuss what we wish to change and why we want to change it in order to win your approval. Your website will read as if it was originally written in chinese, not just a simple translation.

Q. We can do our own translations, can you still help us put them onto our website?

A. Yes, we are happy to work with your own staff or external translators if you already have a chinese translation facility and simply need our skills and experience to get this onto the web in the right way.

Q. This FAQ looks very similar to one on another website!

A. Yes, it appears that another company providing translation services regarded this page so highly that they copied it almost word for word. This FAQ was written for this website and the other company who have been using a copy of this text without permission have been warned of the consequences! Would you trust your translation work to a company who steal text from other people? When you work with us you can be assured that your translations are genuinely yours and not just copied from something similar on another website. Don't risk future legal problems with content translated by overseas companies where you have no come-back or from other untrustworthy individuals.

FAQ written by Jolyon Ralph. © 2001-2005 Mysterious Ways Developments Ltd. All Rights Reserved.