Chinese Retail & E-Commerce Translation

About the Chinese Language

Chinese is a group of related, but in many cases mutually unintelligible, language varieties, forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many other ethnic groups in China.

Nearly 1.2 billion people (around 16% of the world's population) speak some form of Chinese as their first language. Standard Chinese (Pǔtōnghuà/Guóyǔ/Huáyǔ) is a standardized form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the official language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore. (More on NAATI Certified Chinese Translation)

Standard Chinese (Pǔtōnghuà/Guóyǔ/Huáyǔ) is a standardized form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the official language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The written form of the standard language (中文; Zhōngwén), based on the logograms known as Chinese characters (汉字/漢字; Hànzì), is shared by literate speakers of otherwise unintelligible dialects.

The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle inscriptions, which can be traced back to 1250 BCE. The phonetic categories of Archaic Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern dynasties period, Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. Qieyun, a rime dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language (Guanhua) based on Nanjing dialect of Lower Yangtze Mandarin. Standard Chinese was adopted in the 1930s, and is now the official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan.

Chinese Translation Expertise

Chinese translation requires determining whether the source or target should use Simplified Chinese (used in mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia) or Traditional Chinese (used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau) — these are not interchangeable and using the wrong variant can invalidate a document for its intended purpose. Beyond character sets, vocabulary and phrasing conventions differ between regions. Chinese has no grammatical inflection — no tense, number, or gender markers — so translators must infer and explicitly state in English what is implied by context in Chinese, particularly dates, quantities, and temporal references in legal documents.

Chinese uses logographic characters (hanzi) — Simplified characters average fewer strokes and are used in mainland China, while Traditional characters retain historical forms and are used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. A literate adult typically knows 6,000–8,000 characters. There is no alphabet; transliteration uses Pinyin (mainland) or Zhuyin/Bopomofo (Taiwan). Documents may also contain vertical text layout in Traditional Chinese contexts.

Common Chinese Documents

Chinese documents commonly requiring translation include the 户口本 (hùkǒu běn, household registration booklet), 出生医学证明 (chūshēng yīxué zhèngmíng, birth medical certificate), 结婚证 (jiéhūn zhèng, marriage certificate), 公证书 (gōngzhèng shū, notarial certificate), and 学位证书 (xuéwèi zhèngshū, degree certificate). Mainland Chinese documents typically require notarisation through a Chinese notary public office before they can be authenticated for use in Australia.

NAATI offers certification for both Mandarin and Cantonese, which are classified as separate languages for accreditation purposes despite sharing a writing system. Chinese is among the highest-demand languages for NAATI certification, with a large pool of accredited translators across Australia.

About the Chinese Language

Chinese is the only major modern language that uses a logographic writing system — each character represents a meaning rather than a sound, which means speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Shanghainese) can read the same text. The Chinese writing system has been in continuous use for over 3,400 years, making it the oldest still-active writing system in the world. Simplified Chinese was introduced by the People's Republic of China in the 1950s and 1960s, reducing characters like 龍 (dragon) to 龙 — but this means there are now effectively two written standards that a translator must master.