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Asian language translations: traditional and simplified Chinese

Asia is a land boasting a wealth of languages that are both wonderful and wonderfully complex, languages that have retained an air of mystery throughout the ages.
Here at Soget Est, we have been specializing in the translation of Asian languages for years and look to the East with great fondness. Over the years, we have developed specific expertise in professional translation from and into the three most widely used languages in Asia: Chinese, Japanese and Arabic.

This short guide is designed to provide a little insight into the history, main linguistic characteristics and the various aspects that make Chinese such a fascinating language

CHINESE: A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY

The Chinese language is one of the oldest known forms of writing.
The first attempt in history to analyze the form and structure of Chinese writing — which has undergone many changes over the thousands of years since its inception — dates back to 100 AD. It was around this time that the philosopher Xu Shen finished compiling the first Chinese dictionary, containing an impressive 9,500 characters.
Towards the end of the 19th century, a movement emerged that aimed to simplify Chinese writing.
Between the ’50s and ’60s, the government of the People’s Republic of China formulated a standard to simplify the language, resulting in two parallel systems: Traditional Chinese and its Simplified counterpart.

CURRENTLY, MAINLAND CHINA AND SINGAPORE BOTH USE THE SIMPLIFIED WRITTEN FORM, WHILE TAIWAN AND OTHER CHINESE COMMUNITIES ACROSS THE GLOBE USE THE TRADITIONAL FORM. ALTOGETHER, AN ESTIMATED QUARTER OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION USES CHINESE.

While the general perception is that each Chinese character is a simplified image of an object or a concept, this language is actually a complex hybrid of ideograms, pictograms, and semantic and phonetic elements.

CHARACTERS

All Chinese characters have been classified into 5 major categories:

Pictographic characters number just a few hundred. Barely a fraction of the tens of thousands of characters making up the Chinese language.
And yet, there is no denying their enduring allure. This is because they are descended from age-old drawings of physical everyday objects, although the modern form has been simplified and standardized over time.
While these characters are almost always abstract renditions, it is usually still possible to discern remnants of the original pictorial element.

Unlike pictograms, which depict physical objects, ideograms represent ideas and abstract concepts.
For example, they can indicate concepts such as “above” and “under”, or natural numbers such as “three” or “four”.

The meaning of these ideograms comes from the sum of their component parts.
For example, the ideogram indicating the word “truthful” is made up of two characters: one meaning “man” and the other meaning “word”. And then there is the ideogram used to express the verb “to sit”, which comprises the “man” character placed on top of the character for “earth”.

Akin to a rebus, a phonetic loan character retains the phonetic value of a homophonous character, with no regard to its meaning. This makes it almost invariably impossible to explain its etymology.

These compounds, which account for 90% of all Chinese characters, combine the elements of two independent characters: the meaning of one and phonetics of the other.
For example, the character for “sugar” combines the semantic component meaning “cereal” with the phonetic component [tang], which, on its own, can indicate the Tang dynasty.
Phono-semantic compounds allow for the creation of a never-ending stream of new characters.

chinese translation

FUN FACT: HOW ARE CHINESE CHARACTERS CONSTRUCTED?

Chinese characters have 8 main graphical components (or “radicals”), which form the base for building all complex characters. There are 214 recognized radicals in the modern classification of the language, and they are key to the order in which words are listed in Chinese dictionaries.
Each character comprises one or more graphical components, put together in a specific order. Regardless of the number of graphical components, each character must fit inside an invisible box.

chinese translation

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