Cultural Primer: Why Your Site Must "Speak" Chinese (Part Two of Two)

February 8, 2008

This is Part Two in a series on the Chinese and Chinese American markets. Find Part One here.

Depend on a leader to connect with Chinese markets
Companies eager to connect with multi-lingual audiences cannot deny the economic power and potential of mainland and U.S.-based Chinese markets. Many of MotionPoint's travel and manufacturing clients are already catering to these markets.

The demand for Chinese-language websites has soared in recent years. In the past three years, MotionPoint's deployment of WLM-powered Chinese sites has grown by 1,000% -- with an unprecedented surge in 2006-2007, during which MotionPoint's Chinese sites grew by 250% from the previous year.

MotionPoint is the leader in Chinese website translation, and regularly provides clients with helpful information about this influential market. For instance, the company's representatives take special care to explain the differences between Chinese spoken dialects and written character sets.

For instance, Cantonese and Mandarin are dialects spoken in China and surrounding territories. Cantonese is mostly spoken in the nation's Guangdong province, Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is Hong Kong's de facto official spoken language. In contrast, Mandarin is a category of dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western China. There are more Mandarin speakers than any other language in China.

Interestingly, Cantonese and Mandarin are not written languages -- an important distinction for companies interested in translating their websites. The Chinese written language comes in two "flavors" -- Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.

Traditional Chinese characters hail from the Han Dynasty (from 206 BC to 220 AD), and have remained unchanged since the 5th century. This style uses characters that can be complex in design, and are therefore harder to read and write. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Simplified Chinese characters, however, are much more prevalent. The Simplified character set is based on Traditional characters, but are visually less complex, and are often graphic or phonetic simplifications of those traditional forms. Since the 1950s, China's government has promoted Simplified Chinese for use in printing to increase literacy. Simplified Chinese is officially used in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia.

MotionPoint has unparalleled expertise in Chinese linguistics, and often makes recommendations on which "flavor" of Chinese text to use in website translations. If a client is looking to connect with the entire Chinese market (including Taiwan and Hong Kong), MotionPoint recommends translating that site to Traditional Chinese, as Taiwan and Hong Kong residents read this script exclusively.

For those looking to connect with only the mainland China market -- or the U.S. Chinese market -- MotionPoint recommends Simplified Chinese.

MotionPoint's breakthrough WLM technology empowers clients to translate their sites into either Simplified or Traditional Chinese -- or both. MotionPoint technology also allows marketers to dynamically tailor content by language and geography. MotionPoint provides its clients an elegant "end-to-end" solution. Clients craft culturally- or regionally-specific messages in English, and MotionPoint handles the translation and localization required to present them in Chinese.

This has been an efficient and elegant solution for MotionPoint's U.S. and global clients, such as Delta Air Lines, CIT Group, Jabil Circuit, Delphi Corporation and others.