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Chinese Translation Services

Cinese is an important language in business. It's important to remember that 1.3 billion people call Chinese their native tongue. This language is spoken all over Asia, including Southeast Asian and Taiwan, and has numerous dialects. The system of writing associated with Chinese, Kanji, is used by other languages, as well, including Japanese and in some formal and artistic instances for Korean. Chinese is also a very common language in some parts of the US, with the West Coast being somewhat famous for the amount of people who speak it as a first or second language.

Chinese is actually not one language. There are several different versions of this language. They are sometimes called dialects, but this is not universally-accepted. Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken form of the language in the world, with 850 million people speaking it. Cantonese is also very popular, with 70 million speakers. Wu boasts 90 million speakers and Min 70 million. To make this more complex, the speakers of one type of Chinese cannot generally understand the speakers of another. Those who do not speak the languages can oftentimes tell that one is very different from the other, just from hearing them spoken.

Chinese, of course, has its own writing system, which adds still another layer of complexity. This writing system, unlike most Western and Middle Eastern systems, is not necessarily read right-to-left or left-to-right. The writing system itself can take a lifetime to master, with the ornate symbols sometimes translating to phonetic sounds and sometimes having entire meanings of their own. Not surprisingly, this language is an international lingua franca, one of the official languages of the UN and is widely-used in contracts and treaties around the world. The market available to those who speak this language cannot be understated.

You'll find Chinese spoken on Hong Kong and Taiwan, two of the most important destinations for international business. China itself has been consistently opening up its markets to the rest of the world and, considering that a large percentage of the world is Chinese, this means a huge business opportunity for those who have access to the language. The language is also increasingly popular as a second language, as a good deal of technical and scientific work is done in China. Along with English, this is one of the most vital languages in the world for those who do business.