There Is More than One Chinese

Chinese (Mandarin vs. Cantonese, Traditional vs. Simplified)

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion what exactly “Chinese” means in regard to both the spoken language and the written language.

Mandarin and Cantonese are the most widely spoken Chinese dialects, but they are by no means the only ones. For day-to-day conversation, many people still prefer to speak in the dialect of their respective regions. It is common to find that two people speaking two different dialects cannot communicate verbally; however, they can communicate in writing thanks to the standardization of the Traditional and Simplified writing systems.

The origin of the Chinese writing system is pictorial, dating back thousands of years. People drew pictures to express their thoughts – in short, to communicate. As you can imagine, this method of written communication was very cumbersome, making complex thoughts difficult to express. As a result, a number of reforms have been initiated to stylize and simplify the manner of writing Chinese. This has, in turn, resulted in a more uniform writing style.

The mid-twentieth century language reform simplified the characters used in the Traditional Chinese writing system by reducing the number of strokes needed to write a character. The end result was the Simplified Chinese writing system. The PRC and Singapore currently use the Simplified Chinese writing system. Hong Kong and Taiwan use the Traditional Chinese writing system. Since Hong Kong has been integrated into the PRC, we may see an increase in the use of Simplified Chinese there.

It is generally easier for a person who knows Traditional Chinese to understand Simplified Chinese characters than for a person who knows Simplified Chinese to understand the Traditional Chinese ones, but this may not be the case for everybody.

To help with the phonetic learning of the language, the use of the Roman alphabet to “spell” the pronunciation of Chinese characters was introduced. The phonetic spelling system is called Pinyin, and is widely used in China today. The commonly used phonetic system in Taiwan is Zhuyin or Bopomofo, but it uses a stroke-based set of symbols derived from ancient Chinese characters instead of the Roman alphabet.

Chinese is comprised of several major dialects and two major writing systems.

The next time you need to localize into Chinese, be sure you know exactly what locales you are targeting.

For more information contact Dawni Jacobs at djacobs@ptiglobal.com.