Chinese Business Document Translation
ASTA-USA Translation Services, Inc. understands the importance of performing Chinese business document translation correctly. The demand for translation from Chinese to English or English to Chinese for U.S. corporations is growing rapidly in today’s economy. That’s why our team of experienced, native-speaking translators can be trusted with your important business document translation projects. Their experience, combined with our innovative proofreading technique, guarantees your company an error-free translation every time.
There are entire websites dedicated to humorous “translations gone wrong” from Chinese into English and the other way around, and the movie ‘Lost in Translation’ could have easily been set in Beijing instead of Tokyo. How tricky the accuracy issue can be, in politics and business, was recently demonstrated by an article in the Wall Street Journal debating whether the new leader of the Chinese Communist Party actually apologized for being late when addressing congress last month for the first time.
On the international stage, a seemingly minor linguistic detail—did Xi Jinping say the word ‘sorry’ or was it added by the interpreter to translate his acknowledgment in Chinese into a more common English expression (“Sorry to keep you waiting”)? —can become a weighty issue. Media outlets around the globe used his statement as a lead-in to their articles about the latest political change in China: ABC News, for instance, wrote “The Xi Jinping era began in China today with a smile and an apology.” Such reports set the tone for the public perception of one of the most powerful countries in the world.
It is common knowledge that the two languages, English and Chinese, differ in fundamental ways, which makes the translation process between them one of the most challenging. Accuracy in Chinese document translation will only be achieved by experienced professionals, and as the example above shows, the subtleties of cultural and linguistic differences can be profound. While we chuckle at examples of shirts or tattoos that, for instance, read “noodles” instead of “loyalty” in Chinese characters, or English-language signs in China stating, “Please don’t randomly but actually trash”, we gladly forego the humor in our business communications.