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German to Chinese and Chinese to German document translations of the highest quality — meeting your needs with our services. We guarantee:
- Translators who are native speakers of the target language, whether it is German or Chinese
- ISO 9001 and ISO 17001 quality standard compliance
- Localization expertise in your line of work (medicine, engineering, etc.)
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See below, what kind of changes to the text might be expected for translations from German to Chinese or vice versa.
Translation differences
Translation from German to Chinese or vice versa entails certain changes in the resulting text. These changes are caused by the inherent differences between the languages. The following things in your order might be affected:
- The layout of the resulting text
- Time it takes to translate
- Translation complexity
Among other factors, these parameters can influence the final price as well. The layout factor is especially important to those, who are interested in our DTP (Desktop Publishing) services.
| Parameter | To German | To Chinese | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Writing system | Latin (German alphabet) | Chinese character (Hanzi logograms) | Different writing systems: drastic difference |
| Text direction | left-to-right | left-to-right or top-to-bottom-to-left | Different |
| Characters per word (average) | 7 | 2 | Significant |
| Text length (characters) | 378% longer | 79% shorter | Significant |
| Overall difference | Drastic | ||
Text length and document layout
The main factors influencing the length and layout of the translated document are:
- Writing system of the target language
- Writing direction
- Word length
- Relative lengths of the texts
Writing system
German uses Latin alphabet, whereas Chinese employs Chinese character logograms. It may make the translated text shorter or longer than the original, and makes selecting the correct font for the target language essential. Given the same font size, Latin symbols are generally 67% smaller than the Chinese character ones.
Writing direction
German is read left-to-right, but Chinese — left-to-right or top-to-bottom-to-left. It means that, in the translated document, the order of the text and visual elements should be reversed. This is crucial for technical documents and visual instructions, and demands additional work from the DTP specialists.
Word length
Words in German are, on average, 7 characters long, and Chinese words are 2 characters long. This might result in lines of text not being distributed similarly between the source and the target text.
Text length
On average, documents translated to German are 378% longer than source texts in Chinese. On the other hand, Chinese texts are 79% shorter than their German counterparts. It means that some formatting differences are to be expected in the translated texts. Please note, that the actual visual length is also influenced by the font used.
Word order
Depending on your needs, the word order might be rather important for the translation. Things like slogans and brand names may convey an entirely different meaning, if their word order is changed.
The standard word orders of the languages are different. Various sentence structures may still be possible, but they might have a different meaning or change their style. However, it must be noted, that German has a free word order. This implies that translations from Chinese to German will usually allow preserving your desired sentence structure.
Translation complexity
Translation complexity is partially dependent on how closely the languages are related. The further apart the languages are, the more time and effort it takes to express an idea from one language in another one. As a consequence, it affects the price and time it takes to translate a document between German and Chinese.
The languages in question belong to different families — German is Indo-European, while Chinese is Sino-Tibetan. It means that a relatively more skilled translator is needed for the job, especially if technical documents, e.g. patents, are in question.