Important Formatting Tips for Translating Your Website from English to Chinese

Important Formatting Tips for Translating Your Website from English to Chinese

Translating your website from English to Chinese isn’t as simple as translating the words from one language to the other. There are several formatting nuisances that you have to keep in mind of.

It’s not just translation-transliteration issues either; these are formatting hurdles that will require a professional agency to help you out.

Here’s a quick look at some of the important formatting tips that you need to follow when translating your website from English to Chinese:

Left-to-Right, Right-to-Left

Many people forget reading habits when translating a site from English to Chinese. An American reads from left to right before moving to the sentence directly below. Reading Chinese is the exact opposite of this. Chinese read from top to bottom and from the right edge to the left. It is especially true for banner graphics which need to be re-formatted in order to accommodate this cultural difference.

Font Differences

English letters can be written nearly every size possible but Chinese characters are a bit more restrictive because the characters can be quite complex, requiring them to be at least a certain size to be recognizable. This means spacing for the characters differ radically from the English version.

Another issue is that Chinese characters do not use italics. This means other means will have to be used to apply emphasis on words and phrases.

Handling font sizes also affects graphical content like banner ads and headings. All the visual content of the website need to be edited on Photoshop or other tools to make sure they still fit the dimensions of the site and that they work with the altered context due to translation.

Chinese-Centric Specifics

The Chinese have their own units of measurement, their own calendar (their New Year falls in February), and their own set of holidays. All of these need to be taken into consideration when translating a website into Chinese because you want your website to cater what is familiar to them.

These specifics can make the process of translation last longer than one would expect.

Simply translating a few words might seem quick and simple but when you have an online retail site selling hundreds of phones or medications and offer discounts on special holidays then you need to adjust all those manually.

Formatting for Your Target Audience

Diversifying your website to cater to a whole new group of people is very challenging but it can be very rewarding.

With a reliable website translation agency, you can get this done with as little hiccups as possible. It will save money and time while also providing you a better shot at connecting to a foreign market.

For details of our Chinese web solution such as English to Chinese website translation, Chinese web design, and Chinese SEO and eMarketing, please contact us.

Source:

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