There are many rumors about Internet opportunities in China. Website owners hear that China has far more Internet users than any other country, they see reports on how the Chinese economy is advancing even when other countries’ economies are lagging, and they hear the question “what is your strategy in China?” ” he asked over and over again.
If you’re interested in expanding your website to reach the “other half of the Internet,” one of the first things you’ll probably wonder is what kind of Chinese should be used. Mandarin or Cantonese? Traditional or simplified? I’ll give you the simple answer first, and then I’ll answer the most common questions I hear.
The simple answer: if you want to attract the maximum number of Chinese consumers, use Mandarin Chinese written in Simplified Chinese characters.
“What about the Cantonese?” They often ask me. Cantonese is just one of the many Chinese dialects spoken. It is spoken mainly by people from Guangdong and Hong Kong province. There has been a huge wave of Cantonese-speaking emigrants in the last fifty years, so much so that many Western cities have large populations of Cantonese speakers, leading some Westerners to think that Cantonese is much more important than it is. In fact, Mandarin is the official language of China and most Cantonese speakers can also understand Mandarin.
“How many Chinese letters are there?” is another question I hear a lot. The answer is that there are no Chinese “letters” – Chinese uses “characters” and there are many thousands of Chinese characters used in modern Chinese. Most modern Chinese words consist of two characters, but there are also words with only one character or three or more characters.
“Isn’t there more than one type of Chinese writing?” Yes there are. There are two forms of Chinese characters: “traditional” and “simplified”. Today, the simplified form is used in mainland China, making it the global standard. However, the traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and many Chinese immigrant communities. Readers of one form can often understand the other form.
Finally, a common question is “Which direction do you write in Chinese?” Chinese is generally written from left to right. The only reason a website would be written from right to left or top to bottom is to give a fancy image, usually for traditional products. So you don’t need to create a mirror version of your website design.
So there you have it, as a general rule, when you have your website translated into Chinese, you should use Mandarin Chinese written in simplified characters. Only if you are targeting a specific Chinese location (or emigrants from that location) should you consider using traditional characters and another Chinese dialect such as Cantonese.
