There’s a lot of buzz going around about opportunities on the Chinese internet. Website owners hear that China has far more internet users than any other country, they see reports of the Chinese economy surging forward even while other countries’ economies are lagging, and they hear the question “what is your China strategy?” asked over and over again.
If you are interested in expanding your website to reach the “other half of the internet,” one of the first things you probably wondered is what type of Chinese should be used. Mandarin or Cantonese? Traditional or Simplified? First I’ll give you the simple answer, and then answer the most common questions I hear.
The simple answer: If you want to attract the maximum number of Chinese consumers, use Mandarin Chinese written in Simplified Chinese characters.
“What about Cantonese?” I’m often asked. Cantonese is just one of many spoken Chinese dialects. It is spoken mostly by people from Canton province and Hong Kong. There was a large wave of Cantonese speaking emigrants over the past fifty years, so much so that many Western cities have a large population of Cantonese speakers, causing some Westerners to think that Cantonese is a lot more important than it is. In fact, Mandarin is the official language of China and most Cantonese speakers can understand Mandarin as well.
“How many Chinese letters are there?” is another question I hear a lot. The answer is that there aren’t any Chinese “letters” – Chinese uses “characters,” and there are many thousands of Chinese characters used in modern Chinese. Most modern Chinese words consist of two characters, but there are also words with just one character or with three or more characters.
“Isn’t there more than one kind of Chinese writing?” Yes, there is. There are two forms of Chinese characters – “traditional” and “simplified.” Nowadays, the simplified form is used on mainland China, and that makes it the global standard. However, traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and in many Chinese immigrant communities. Readers of one form can often understand the other form.
Finally, a common question is “Which direction is Chinese written?” Chinese is usually written left-to-right. The only reason a website would be written right-to-left or top-to-bottom would be to give a fancy image, usually for traditional products. So, you don’t need to create a mirrored version of your website design.
So, there you have it, as a general rule, when you have your website translated into Chinese, you should use Mandarin Chinese written in simplified characters. Only if you are targeting a specific Chinese location (or emigrants from that location) should you consider using traditional characters and another Chinese dialect such as Cantonese.