Languages · Core pair
Chinese translation for public agencies.
Traditional or Simplified is a decision about your audience, not a preference. We ask which one you need, and we can deliver both from a single review pass.
- 中文
- Traditional and Simplified
- Retained reviewers
- Returned same business day
Decisions
What we settle before the first sentence.
These are choices, not defaults. Each one is agreed at intake, recorded, and carried into the next document so a set stays consistent with itself.
Traditional or Simplified — an audience decision
San Francisco public materials commonly appear in Traditional characters, which is what the city's long-established Cantonese-speaking population reads. More recent arrivals from mainland China generally read Simplified. Neither is more correct; they address different readers. Tell us which population the document is for and we set the script to it. If the answer is both, we produce both, and the second version does not cost a second translation because the review is shared.
Written Chinese serves both Cantonese and Mandarin readers
Cantonese and Mandarin are spoken languages. Written standard Chinese is read by speakers of both, which is why a document is not commissioned as Cantonese or Mandarin the way an interpreter is. If you need spoken-Cantonese phrasing for a script that will be read aloud at a hearing or recorded for a phone line, say so at intake, because that is a different text.
Regional convention beyond the script
Script and vocabulary are separate choices. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland conventions differ in technical and administrative terms even where the characters are shared. We set the convention to match the script choice and your audience rather than mixing them.
Names, addresses, and untranslated strings
Agency names, office addresses, and form numbers usually stay legible in English so a reader can act on them at a counter or on an envelope. We set a rule for that at the start of a document set and keep it consistent across the set.
Hazards
Where this pair breaks.
Most of what goes wrong in a translated public document is not a mistranslation. It is a production failure that survives approval and shows up in the file your reader receives.
This pair takes the longest to review, and we schedule it that way
Of the pairs we staff directly, Chinese is the one where an unreviewed draft degrades fastest: ambiguous English noun strings, defined program terms, and negation in conditional sentences all fail quietly and produce text that looks fluent while saying something else. A reviewer who does not read the source English cannot catch it. Ours reads both, and we budget more review time for Chinese than for the other core pairs rather than running every language against the same clock.
Line breaking without inter-word spaces
Chinese text has no spaces between words, so software breaks lines between characters. Left alone, that splits two-character compounds and proper nouns across lines, orphans a single character, and separates a number from its measure word. It is legible but it reads as unproofed. We set line-breaking rules in layout so the text breaks where a reader expects it to.
A different punctuation set
Chinese uses full-width punctuation with its own spacing behavior — the ideographic full stop, full-width commas and colons, and the enumeration comma that separates items in a list, which is not the same mark as an ordinary comma. Reusing ASCII punctuation from the English source is the most visible sign of a document nobody typeset. So is leaving straight quotation marks where corner brackets belong.
Font coverage and mixed-script runs
A PDF built with a font that lacks the required characters substitutes glyphs from another face, which changes weight and alignment mid-line, or drops characters entirely. Where English form codes or URLs sit inline in Chinese text, spacing between the scripts has to be set deliberately rather than inherited.
California context
Why San Francisco agencies buy this pair.
Chinese is a threshold language under San Francisco's Language Access Ordinance (Admin. Code ch. 91), and it is covered by city departments across the full range of public-facing material: notices, applications, public-meeting materials, and web content. The city's limited-English-proficient Chinese-speaking population is the largest of any language group in San Francisco.
What makes it operationally distinct from Spanish is the script question. An agency that publishes a single Chinese version without deciding which readers it is for has usually served one part of its population and not the other. The practical answer is often both versions, which is why we treat the second script as a production step rather than a second job.
Descriptions of the law here are general. What a particular department owes in a particular case is the department’s determination, not ours.
We hold retained reviewers in this pair, which is what makes the standard turnaround a schedule rather than an aspiration.
- Standard
- Priority
- Scheduled
Intake
What we will ask you.
These are the Chinese questions specifically. Answering them in your first email shortens the quote and removes the round trip.
Traditional, Simplified, or both?
Which readers is this for — the established Cantonese-speaking community, more recent arrivals, or a general citywide audience?
Will any of this text be read aloud or recorded? Spoken-Cantonese phrasing is a different deliverable.
Do you have a previously published Chinese version whose terminology we should match?
Are we producing the final PDF, or handing text back into your template?
Send us a Chinese document.
Attach the file, tell us the deadline, and answer whichever of the questions above apply. A written quote comes back same business day.