Traditional and Simplified Chinese
English Simplified Chinese Translation Services
LingoStar Translation Services Canada | USA provides professional translation from English to Simplified Chinese and Chinese to English and interpreting from English to Mandarin. Thanks to a well established network of top Simplified Chinese translators and linguists we are serving all major cities in Canada - Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver and the USA – New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and more. We offer Simplified Chinese document translation, English to Simplified Chinese website localization and Cantonese and Mandarin interpreting services. Additionally we offer Simplified Chinese editing by native translators and editors, typesetting by experienced Chinese typesetters and video game localization and voiceovers by specialized Mandarin voiceover artists and translators. Our experienced native English to Simplified Chinese translators and interpreters are meticulously selected to provide English to Chinese services of the best possible quality for your particular needs!
Only native Chinese translators know about the cultural background of the Simplified Chinese language and can localize websites or documents for different Chinese speaking countries, e.g. China, Taiwan, and Chinese speakers in the USA, etc. We are able to work in many Chinese regional varieties and dialects. The most commonly requested dialect for translation is Mandarin for mainland China which is essentially written out as Simplified Chinese in English to Mandarin translations. Our team consists of experienced medical, technical and legal Mandarin Chinese | Simplified Chinese translators. Our Simplified Chinese translators will expertly handle your project in your specific industry. We have completed numerous Simplified Chinese | Mandarin translations in these fields and more:
- Advertising
- Business and Employment
- Engineering
- Finance
- Forestry
- Marketing
- Mining
- Packaging and Labels
- Training
- Software and IT
- Technology
- Travel and Tourism
Furthermore, we also offer Simplified Chinese certified and notarized translations for passports, driver’s licenses, divorce decrees, birth and marriage certificates, legal documents, transcripts, diplomas and other Simplified Chinese certified document translations.
As Chinese is the most spoken language in the world you should definitely consider English to Simplified Chinese and Simplified Chinese to English document and website translation and software localization. Your Chinese website will help you to reach your target Chinese speaking community and expand your business to the global market!
If you are looking for professional English to Simplified Chinese or Simplified Chinese to English translation, don’t hesitate to contact LingoStar today!
About Chinese Language
The Origin and History of Chinese Text
Nowadays Chinese is becoming more and more widespread. The Chinese writing system is unique in the modern world of alphabet scripts and has played a significant role in the development of Chinese culture. Let’s explore its origin and understand the difference between Traditional and Simplified Chinese text.
Once, ancient Sumerian and Egyptian symbols were in widespread use, but today only Chinese characters remain from this ancient era. Chinese characters are not just a jumble of symbols and pen strokes made at random but they follow a precise logic: poetic and often fascinating.
First of all, let’s have a look at different types of characters:
- Pictographs – they evolved from simple pictures of everyday life.
山 represents a mountain.
- Ideographs - abstract representations of things.
The character for above 上is represented by a line pointing up, the one for below下 by a line pointing down.
- Sound-loans - characters that "borrow" the way they are written from other characters, which can have a totally different meaning, but are pronounced the same way.
虫 = insect, 義 = righteous, 虫 +義 = ant
- Sound-meaning compound characters – The character is formed by merging two separate characters - one that has a pronunciation identical or very similar to it, the second one that suggests its meaning.
The character used for ‘elephant’ combined with the one that represents ‘man’ means ‘portrait’.
- Meaning-meaning compound characters - words made by the union of the meaning of two or more characters.
女= mom,子= child, equals 好= good
For the Chinese, to enter a house and see a woman holding a baby is ‘good’; it’s how life is supposed to be.
Simplified and Traditional Chinese Characters
The most sophisticated and earliest Chinese characters are found in inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones of the Shang Dynasty (17th-11th century BC) and resemble drawings. Chinese characters have evolved since then through a long process.
During the Shang Dynasty and Western Zhou Dynasty (1121-771BC), inscriptions were made on bronze ware. After the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty (221-207BC) unified China, he also unified Chinese characters and introduced a very beautiful and ornate style of writing.
Since these ornate characters were very time consuming to write, the Qin Dynasty further developed them by creating a new style. During the Han Dynasty, this new style combined with new forms of calligraphy (206BC-AD8) and became the main official script. This script broke away from the pictographic element of ancient Chinese characters, laying the foundations for 楷书 Kaishu, the regular script. Kaishu finalized the use of block-shaped Chinese characters and has been used ever since.
The Difference between Traditional and Simplified Chinese
Traditional Chinese uses about 13,000 Kaishu characters; some of the characters are highly complex. The complexity of this written system was one of the causes of widespread illiteracy in China for many years.
In the 1950s, a Character Reform Committee in the People’s Republic of China systematically simplified the characters in order to ease the effort in writing and encourage literacy. These reforms reduced the number of character strokes by an average of one half. This simplified character set of about 8000 characters, known as Simplified Chinese, now appears in all print media in Mainland China and Singapore. However, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and various diasporic Chinese communities still use the more complex character set, known as Traditional Chinese.
