When you travel to a new country, sometimes you have enough time and guidance to become well acquainted with its language and sometimes not. People often settle for symbolic equivalents or interpretation guides to help them get by. After all, this is a vacation you can float through.
But traveling to a new market, like China, is not a vacation. At least not in the initial stages. What you need is a good Chinese translation service. If you are introducing your product to a new but huge market like China, you cannot ignore the dangers of non-translation. Your website or app should be wrapped in the fabric of this local culture, language, and colloquial alignment. If you want your product and communication to work seamlessly, you don’t need to learn Chinese from scratch.
But that does not mean that it does not need to locate for the Chinese market.
You need a professional expert who knows this market and a suite of services that can handle this challenge with a large inventory of translation experts who are experts in both languages: the source language of your country and the target language of the new market.
Save your brand from the dragon’s fire.
China, in particular, is a market where brands tiptoe with great caution and care. Marketers are wary of wrong steps around polysemy, meaning words that have multiple meanings, as well as synonymy, meaning different words that have similar meanings. Some major and world-ruling brands have often paid a huge price in terms of brand equity and endurance in this market because they skipped over the same slogans, slogans, and instruction manuals that they had in the home market, without figuring out what they sounded like on the market. Chinese. context. The language here may have a different vocabulary and some seemingly harmless or impressive words may sound completely different and risky in a Chinese translation.
Therefore, brands and communication experts tend to walk on eggshells to warn of the semantic dangers of antonymy, hyponymy, or hypernymy.
The local language gets more attention
That is not the only reason to ask a professional language service provider for help. Around the world, a large number of consumers have shown in several studies that they prefer to buy products whose information is available in their own local language. The likelihood that consumers will be inclined to buy a product online that has information in their own language increases by several points.
Which to choose: Mandarin or Cantonese
Roughly 850 million people in China speak Mandarin Chinese compared to around 85 million Cantonese Chinese. However, the interior of China is still dominated by Cantonese. When it comes to places like Hong Kong, you can still see the mastery of Cantonese. You need to choose the type of Chinese language to be used based on the target audience and potential reach.
Therefore, placing a website or other vital product information in the local language, under the expert gaze and keyboard of a local expert translator, is crucial for a savvy marketer. China is full of new opportunities, but a small step in the wrong lane can cost a lot. So be sure to choose someone who can translate from English to Chinese, knows the market, and has the services, resources, talent, and vision to navigate the language quirks in those markets.
There is no way you want the dragon to breathe fire due to the translation gaps.
