Chinese Translation

With Chinese, the first decision is yours to make: where is the document going? That single question settles not only the writing system but the set of terms, the date format and the approval route along with it. Three texts prepared for mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong cannot be copies of one another; the same legal concept goes by a different name in each of the three.

Writing and speech are two separate choices

For written work the choice lies between simplified and traditional characters. For spoken work it lies between Mandarin and Cantonese, and in speech those two diverge to the point of being mutually unintelligible. When you ask for an interpreter for a meeting, you need to tell us which region the participants come from; a request for “a Chinese interpreter” carries too little information on its own. Wanting traditional characters in a written document and working in Mandarin at the meeting is an entirely ordinary combination.

Converting between the two character sets looks like an automatic operation. It is not. One simplified character may correspond to several traditional ones, and only the context settles which is right. A contract put through machine conversion can end up saying something else because of a single wrong character.

Recurring mistakes from Turkish into Chinese

• Not carrying across the logic of numerical place values. Chinese names the places of large numbers in units of ten thousand; a figure read with the habit of grouping in threes produces the wrong amount in commercial correspondence.
• Disturbing the order of the date. Chinese writes dates as year, month, day, each followed by its own character; a date built in the Turkish order looks foreign.
• Leaving out measure words. Chinese inserts between the numeral and the noun a word that varies with the kind of object; omitting it is a grammatical error.
• Translating company-type suffixes freely. Whatever Chinese company name is entered in the trade registry is the one that is used; a name reconstructed from the Turkish cannot be found in the register.

What comes through

Document	Context	Script preference
Supply and distributorship contract	Import and manufacturing partnerships	Simplified
Product documentation and test reports	Customs and conformity procedures	Simplified
Diploma and academic transcript	Student mobility	Varies by institution
Company registry and investment papers	Business linked to Taiwan and Hong Kong	Traditional
Civil registry and marriage records	Mixed marriages, residence permits	Simplified

In commercial files the problem we meet most often is that the contract does not say which of its Turkish and Chinese versions is to prevail. Where that clause is missing, the two texts confront one another as soon as a disagreement arises. When we hand over the translation, we remind you to check that the clause is there.

Another critical point is that the acceptance of official translations in China is tied to an institutional arrangement: the party doing the translation is expected to be registered and to affix its own seal to the document. A sworn translation obtained in Türkiye is accepted in a great many procedures, yet some institutions additionally look for a seal in the country of destination. Which level is required is determined by the institution’s own written notice; pass that notice on to us and we can spare you unnecessary expense.

Spelling the name: characters or passport?

Chinese names put the surname first and the given name after it, and their Latin-letter equivalents rest on an official system of reading. Different reading traditions are used for people of Taiwanese and Hong Kong origin, however, and the same string of characters may have gone into the passport with an entirely different Latin spelling. For that reason we do not re-read the name from the characters; we take the spelling on the identity page of the passport as authoritative. In the other direction, Turkish names are carried into Chinese with characters chosen for their sound; that choice is not arbitrary, since established correspondence tables are used and kept constant throughout the file.

The same rule governs company names. Once the Chinese name of a Turkish company has been fixed, it must stay the same across every document; one string of characters in the contract and another on the invoice creates a matching problem in the other party’s accounting records. In long-running business relationships we keep these names as a list and apply the same list to later work.

Turnaround and sending the file

Chinese is among the languages we work in regularly in Türkiye, and commercial and personal documents follow the standard flow. When you send a document, let us know the target region, the script preference and any term list used previously. For the fee and the delivery date, upload your document; unit rates are in our price list.

The fees on this page are read from the current tariff and vary with the type of document and the speed of delivery. Where you are in doubt, it is worth putting the question to the institution before you apply.