Our Chinese legal translators all have extensive experience, the relevant qualifications and their own individual track records providing Chinese legal translations.
As an agency, we have extensive qualifications including:
- a large client base of international legal firms
- relevant quality certifications
- membership of key industry bodies including the ATA and ATC
- a large number of professional, qualified Chinese legal translators available immediately and already under binding non-disclosure agreements.
Of course the legal world covers many disciplines and it is not the case that any Chinese legal translator will have the breadth of knowledge to know all the terms of art in for every field of law. Therefore it is important that we understand the context and are then able to allocate the work to someone with appropriate experience.
We are able to offer certified and notarized Chinese translations. Our industry credentials and association memberships allow us to issue stamped letters of authenticity. However, certain situations also require involving a notary. It is important to check the level of authentication, if any, required in order that we can provide the appropriate Chinese legal translation service.
We have specialist teams of Chinese linguists in various fields and competences. They are experts in their industry, with relevant knowledge and experience, and we assign them to work according to their skills sets.
Although many of our Chinese linguists are located in China we also have a large number of mother tongue Chinese translators and interpreters dispersed all around the world. Our global Project Management presence and dispersed teams of Chinese translators means that we can offer you real advantages where you have tight turnaround requirements.
The Chinese language is made up of a collection of interlinked variations of language, although several of which are not reciprocally intelligible, and has been defined variously as a language family or language. Native speech originally of the Han majority in the China, the language practices a division of the Sino-Tibetan language family. More than one billion people speak Chinese, which connects around one-fifth of the world’s population who express at least one form of Chinese as their native language.
Inborn speakers will identify dissimilar varieties of Chinese as vernaculars of one language, rather than singular languages, even though identifying languages this way is supposed to be inappropriate if you are a sinologists or linguists. The diversity within the nation of the Chinese language has been compared to that of the likeness yet nuanced variances in the Romance languages, although all varieties of Chinese are critical and tonal. There are somewhere among 7 and 13 regional groups that are classified as key groups of Chinese, although this depends on the cataloguing, of which Mandarin is by far the most spoken with some 960 million speakers, ahead of Wu which has 80 million, then Yue which has 60 million talkers and Min with 50 million speakers around the world. Nearly all of these groups happen to be mutually incoherent, although there are omissions like the Southwest Mandarin dialects and Xiang, which can share some degree of intelligibility and mutual terms.
Standard Chinese is encompassed by a standardized form of Chinese that is based on the Beijing vernacular of Mandarin Chinese. It is the government permitted official language of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as well as the Republic of China (or Taiwan), and is also one of the four authorized languages used in Singapore. Due to its swelling importance, Chinese has become one of the six languages officially used in the United Nations.
The other variations of Chinese have importance as well; Cantonese is important in the Guangdong province as well as in Cantonese communities that are abroad, and remains one of the official languages in the nations of Hong Kong and Macau. The Min Nan segment of the language, also recognized as part of the Min collection, is spoken in southern Fujian nations, in neighbouring Taiwan and in Southeast Asia where it can also be identified as Hokkien in Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia. There are also sizeable Shanghainese and Hakka diasporas, like in Taiwan, where the mainstream of the Hakka communities will be able to converse in Taiwanese and Standard Chinese.
Over the centuries, the Chinese language has spread to other realms through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was made into a part of the Han Empire in 111 BC, this was an age of Chinese control that ran for very nearly a thousand years. The Four Commanderies came to power in northern Korea in the first century BCE, but crumbed in the centuries after. Chinese Buddhism then began to spread over East Asia amid the second and the fifth centuries and as it bettered its following, it increased the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later Japan, Korea and Vietnam advanced their own central governments that were sculpted on institutions that were brought in in China, whilst they used Literary Chinese as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would continue in until the late 19th century in Korea and to a reduced extent in Japan, but lasted until the early part of the 20th century in Vietnam.
Despite the fact that they could only use the language in written form, the countries all had their own societal traditions of reading aloud, known as the Sino-Xenic articulations. The words that had these types of pronunciations were copied into the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages and in the present day now make up more than half of their vocabularies. The inflow of these words and pronunciations meant vicissitudes in structure of the phonological merits of the languages, significantly underwriting the development of a type of moraic structure pattern in Japanese and the disturbance of vowel harmony in Korean.
Chinese morphemes that have been plagiarized are used a lot in all of these languages and are used to invent compound words for new concepts, like the way the Ancient Greek and Latin have roots in languages from Europe. Most original compounds, or revised imports for older phrases, were created in the late 1900s and early 2000s to name ideas from Western countries and artefacts. These words, or ‘coinages’ are inscribed in the shared Chinese characters and are liberally borrowed between languages. These coinages are accepted into Chinese, a strange occurrence considering the resistance to permitting loanwords. This is to do with their foreign origin being concealed by the written form of the word. A winner materialized generally only after different compounds for the matching concept were in circulation for some time, and the final choice has contrasted in separate countries
Korea, Vietnam and Japan all settled their own writing systems for their relevant languages, although they were initially based on Chinese characters, but were then supplanted with the Hangul alphabet for the Korean language and with kana syllabaries for Japanese. The Vietnamese alphabet has continued to be inscribed with the Chữ nôm script. These were restricted to popular literature only up until the late 1900s. Today Korean is written entirely with Hangul in North Korea, and accompanying Chinese characters (Hanja) are increasingly infrequently used in the South. Japanese in the current age is written using a combined script that uses Chinese characters and kana, whilst Vietnamese is printed along the lines of a Latin-based alphabet.
