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This is my doubt: I have to submit a site in China and I have to choose between a Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional translation of the site. Which is the most common? is the Mandarin the same of Chinese Traditional? is the language very different in Taiwan and Hong Kong? one of the first sites should be about tourism, but many more, and for different areas, would follow.
Another point is: keywords selection. I have been told that a big amount of keywords optimization 50/200, would be almost useless because of the repetition that the Chinese language would force to during translation. Suggestions about the Max number?
Many thanks!
Luca
So what would you suggest? a translation of the site in traditional and simplified Chinese? and if I was to choose one, which would be more effective? I do not have stats of the Asian surfers.
I have sites for Japan too and I have been told that Asian languages are (by a lot) less expressive than the European one. So that, optimization for a huge number of keywords would bring me to a lot of repetitions and, in many cases, I would be forced to use English words since there are no equivalent in Japanese and Chinese languages. Does it result to you too?
Hope I have made myself clear! ;)
Thank you!
for instance we chose simplified chinese with Unicode because we are chasing visitors from mainland China and Chinese speakers world wide...we have centers in Hong Kong and Singapore that have their own web sites, and somebody else covers Taiwan
if you are selling a high cost product then you probably want to concentrate on Hong Kong and use traditional Chinese with GB encoding...for sheer numbers of people that may also be the best bet right now, though since Internet usage in China itself is increasing it would be a short term solution with simplified Chinese with Unicode being the long term best bet
I have been told that Asian languages are (by a lot) less expressive than the European one. So that, optimization for a huge number of keywords would bring me to a lot of repetitions and, in many cases, I would be forced to use English words since there are no equivalent in Japanese and Chinese languages.I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this, but I get the feeling that you probably heard from someone whose direct translation did not work out well. This is one of the reasons that it is a good idea not only to get your work translated, but also copy written for the local target audience.
If you are trying to do a one-to-one direct translation of keywords from English to Japanese for example, you will probably come up with a lot of unnecessary keyword combinations in English that don't apply to Japanese. Ex: In Japanese there are no plurals or misspellings.
However, there may also be ways to say things in Japanese or Chinese that have no equivalent in English. I use terms in Japanese every day that literally don't have a direct English equivalent, but they are very common use terms.
There are also local cultural reasons why some keywords will work and others will not. You will find this applies to a lot of areas of China depending on what you are targeting.
I would be forced to use English words since there are no equivalent in Japanese and Chinese languages.That can happen in Japan and China. However, even though the English term will be used it will often be localized. In Japanese, now, foreign words are generally written in the Katakana script which looks nothing like English ;). I've heard in China that character combinations are created that sound phonetically close to the original. You'll still have to get these words 'translated' even though they're English.
Thanks a lot! your suggestions have been extremly useful to better understand how things work in the Asiatic area.
Bye!
Bye!You don't have to leave us ;)
No way! :)
I will stick around and I will update you as soon as I will get things done.
