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The official Standard Chinese Language is in fact Standard Mandarin. Standard Mandarin is the official written and spoken language of the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. In addition to Mandarin, the majority of the people of Taiwan also speak the Chinese Hokkien dialect as well. Hong Kong and Macau uses only Standard Mandarin as their official written language while the main spoken language is Cantonese, also a Chinese dialect. Mandarin is also one of the four official spoken and written languages of Singapore and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Within China, Standard Mandarin is called Pǔ tōng huà (普通话) which means common language; in Taiwan, Guó yǔ (国语) which means the national language and in Singapore and Malaysia, Huá yǔ (华语) which means Chinese language.

The phonology (pronunciation) of Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect. An easy way to learn to pronounce Mandarin characters for non-native speakers is to use Hànyǔ Pīnyīn 汉语拼音 ; simply called Pīnyīn 拼音 . Pīnyīn is a common system of mapping written Mandarin characters into Latin alphabets with tone marks. These roman scripts with tone marks can help readers to spell or pronounce the written Mandarin characters with great accuracy.

The same Standard Written Mandarin can be mapped into all Chinese languages and dialects and vice versa. Within China (including Hong Kong and Macau), Taiwan and Singapore; the varieties of Chinese dialects and other Chinese languages are distinct in their spoken forms only, and that the language, when written in Standard Mandarin is common across these countries. Therefore, even though the numerous Chinese languages and dialects are dissimilar to Beijing dialect in terms of pronunciation, literate people are able to communicate via Standard Mandarin in an efficient and effective manner.

There are 2 sets of Chinese characters for modern Chinese written language. They are:

1. Simplified Chinese Characters, pronounced as Jiǎntizì in Pinyin and written as 简体字 in simplified characters or 簡體字 in traditional characters, were created as part of a reform to increase literacy rates in China. These characters were simplified, for instance, by reducing the number of strokes, replacing a complicated component within each character with simpler shapes or replacing the whole character with a totally new and simpler character or systematically applying the same change to the same radical or phonetic component across the traditional set, with exceptions to the rules. Please take note that not all characters are subjected to the simplification process.
2. Traditional Chinese Characters pronounced as fǎntizì in Pinyin and written as 繁体字 in simplified characters or 繁體字in traditional characters.

Unless otherwise specified, the characters in this article are all written in simplified Chinese Characters for easier reading.

Simplified Chinese characters are often used among mainland Chinese and Singaporeans while traditional Chinese characters are currently used in the Republic of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong and Macau. Most native Chinese speakers are able to write in only one of the two systems, though they can usually read both with a bit of guess work.

Written Mandarin uses an ideographic writing system with characters originally derived from pictograms or pictographs, each conveying an idea. There are more than 50,000 characters, 2,000 of which are considered necessary for basic literacy. In order to understand Chinese Characters, we need to understand the six types that can exist and they are:

1. Pictograms or pictographs: These type of characters are stylised symbols simplified to represent the visualised concept, object, activity, place, event or any other image from which it is created. The following are examples of pictograms.
   1. 木 for “tree” which is visualised with branches,
   2. 人 for “man” which is visualised when he is walking ,
   3. 日 for “sun” which is visualised with a central eye in the ancient mystical days,
   4. 月 for “moon” (which resembles the crescent moon seen then),
   5. 田 for “field” which is visualised with furrows and
   6. 山 for “mountain” which is visualised with upright trees.
2. ideograms or ideographs: These are two or more meaningful components (pictograms) combined to create a new character with a new definition. For example;
   1. The pictogram “sun” 日and the pictogram “moon” 月 when put together, can bring to mind a word like “bright” 明.
   2. The word for “thunder” 雷 can be created by combining the pictogram “rain” 雨 and the pictogram “field” 田.
   3. The word for “home or family” can be created by combining the pictogram “roof” 宀 and the pictogram “pig” 豕 (under the roof).
3. Indicatives: These are actually abstract arbitrary symbols with certain pattern(s) to “indicate” their use. Indicatives are different from pictograms in that they do not have any correlation to visualised concepts, objects, activities, places, events or any images.
   1. For example, the character for ‘below’ 下 has a dot below the T of a perpendicular diagram while ‘above’ 上 has an upside down T with the dot above the perpendicular base.
   2. Other examples of indicatives or abstract symbols are Chinese numbers. The abstract symbols for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 are 一, 二 , 三, 四, 五, 六, 七, 八, 九, 十.
4. Semantic-phonetic compounds (also known as picto-phonogram characters): Each character consists of 2 parts; a semantic component (usually called a radical) which hints at the meaning of the character, and a phonetic component which gives a clue to the pronunciation of the character. 90% of all existing characters are of this type. Examples of Semantic-phonetic compound characters are as follows:
   1. For example, you can combine the semantic symbol 贝 ( pronounced as “beì” in Hanyu Pinyin) which relates to sea shell (ancient money), present day money, and currency with:
      1. the phonetic symbol 勾 which on its own is pronounced as goū or goù in Hanyu Pinyin; to evolve into a character 购 (pronounced as goù in Hanyu Pinyin) which means “purchase or buy” or
      2. the phonetic symbol 才 which on its own is pronounced as caí in Hanyu Pinyin; to evolve into a character 财 (pronounced also as caí in Hanyu Pinyin) which means “wealth, valuables, riches” or
      3. the phonetic symbol 化 which on its own is pronounced as huā or huà in Hanyu Pinyin; to evolve into a character 货 (pronounced as huò in Hanyu Pinyin) which means “goods, commodities, products,” or
      4. the phonetic symbol 工 which on its own is pronounced as gōng in Hanyu Pinyin; to evolve into a character 贡 (pronounced as gòng in Hanyu Pinyin) which means “offering, tribute, gifts,” or
      5. the phonetic symbol 长 which on its own is pronounced as cháng, zhǎng or zhàng in Hanyu Pinyin; to evolve into a character 账 (pronounced as zhàng in Hanyu Pinyin) which means “accounts; bill, debt; credit,”
   2. Characters containing the same phonetic component may have the same sound and the same tone, the same sound but a different tone, the same initial or final sound, or a different sound and a different tone.
   3. There are 214 radicals in the most commonly accepted table of radicals for traditional Chinese characters. The transformation of traditional characters to simplified characters has resulted in additional variants of radicals. Being able to recognize the common radicals would help in the learning and recognition of new characters. Some but not all radical are complete characters in their own right. Some radicals have more than one form.
5. Phonetic-loans (also called Borrowed Characters): These characters are homonyms that share the same characters and the same pronunciation, but represent different meanings. For example, the characters for “scorpion” and “10 000” were once, homonyms. The character for “10 000” was borrowed from the character from “scorpion” which was represented by 萬; which results in the present day “10 000” character being 萬.
6. Reclarified characters: These characters are generally created to distinguish themselves from other characters (generally borrowed characters) that had similar characters and similar pronunciation, but different meanings. Following from the example above in point 5. The character “scorpion” was reclarified and added with the radical 虫 (to indicate relationship to bugs); resulting in the present day character as only 蝎 for “scorpion”.

1. Horizontally, from left to right repeatedly beginning from the top of the page and ending at the bottom of the page (similar to English) or
2. Vertically, from top to bottom (thereby creating a column) repeatedly, which is either a phrase or sentence; beginning from the right of the page and ending at the left bottom of the page.

Chinese belong to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages which consists of 3 subfamilies; namely Tibeto-Burman, Chinese, Tai or Thai. Within China, the dialects of Chinese or varieties of Chinese languages are known as fāngyán (regional languages). There are about 850 million mandarin speakers in China while the rest of the 1.12 billion people speak one or more other varieties of Chinese dialects or languages. Spoken Mandarin has 4 tones. Other Chinese languages or dialects may have up to 10 distinct tones.

The name “Mandarin” was introduced by the Portuguese referring to the language spoken by magistrates in the Imperial Courts. The term was then adopted by the Westerners.Origin of Chinese writing

Chinese writing was originated from Hieroglyphics or the drawing of pictographs. For example,

the sun was written                 the moon as                 water as                 the cow as

These picture-words underwent a gradual evolution over the centuries until the pictographs changed into more “square characters”.

The earliest evidence of Chinese writings belonging to the late period of the Dawenkou Culture (5th – 3rd BC), was recently discovered on pottery wine vessels (called zan) found in ancient tombs at Yanghe in Euxian County, Shandong Province. They bear stylized pictographs of some physical objects. These writings were older than the ancient writings that were inscribed on ox scapulae and turtle shells called “oracle bones”; found at the site of the last Shang dynasty (1500-950 BC ) capital near present-day Anyang, Henan province. Written Mandarin is standardized to modern literary works, which reflects more of spoken Mandarin and has more of characters that have at least 2 syllables; as opposed to that of the classical literary works, which is concise and has more single syllable characters. This tradition of mapping, as closely as possible to the spoken language, allows modern written Mandarin materials to be clearly audible and unambiguous even when they are reproduced or converted into oral presentations such as dramas or plays.

The status of a language, in this case Standard Mandarin, is determined by the a) population size of users, their b) economic and c) political power and d) historical factors, that is, whether the language is the dominant language of the nation.

As of 2008, Standard Mandarin is still one of the world’s major languages and is used by approximately 1.12 billion native speakers in China and also by about 20 million non-native users.

(The following list is from George Weber’s article “Top Languages: The World’s 10 Most Influential Languages” in Language Today (Vol. 2, Dec 1997))

Globally, the total number of Standard Mandarin users including non-native users compared to other major languages is as follows:

1. Mandarin (1.12 billion users, Native: 1.1 billion, Non-Native: 20 million)
2. English (480 million users, Native: 330 million, Non-Native: 150 million)
3. Spanish (320 million users, Native: 300 million, Non-Native: 20 million)
4. Russian (285 million users, Native: 160 million, Non-Native: 125 million)
5. French (265 million users, Native: 75 million, Non-Native: 190 million)
6. Hindi/Urdu (250 million users, Native: 250 million, Non-Native: 0 million)
7. Arabic (221 million users, Native: 200 million, Non-Native: 21 million)
8. Portuguese (188 million users, Native: 160 million, Non-Native: 28 million)
9. Bengali (185 million users, Native: 185 million, Non-Native: 0 million)
10. Japanese (133 million users, Native: 125 million, Non-Native: 8 million)
11. German (109 million users, Native: 100 million, Non-Native: 9 million)

Apart from China, Standard Mandarin is used in other parts of the world such as in:

1. Singapore; where there are about 3.75 million native Mandarin speakers out of the total population of 4.9 million.
2. Republic of China (Taiwan), where the total population of 23.1 million would use written Mandarin.

(Total population figures are based on July 1, 2009 estimate by the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs)

China is the 3rd largest economy after the United States and Japan by Nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of USD $4.326 trillion in 2008 in the world as reported by World Bank. In terms of GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP), China ranks 2nd after United States with a value of USD $7.903 trillion in 2009 in the world from World Bank statistics. China’s GDPper Capita (Nominal) was USD$3,566 with a ranking of 99th in 2009 according to IMF (International Monetary Fund). This is due to unequal distribution of wealth and rising income inequalities.

China’s economy has been growing rapidly at an average annual GDP growth rate of over 10%. Being the fastest growing economy, China has seen its per capita income rising at an average annual rate of more than 8% over the last three decades. In addition, China is the largest trading nation in the world and the largest exporter and second largest importer of goods.

A recent article dated on the 10th March 2010 by Bloomberg, BusinessWeek reports that “China’s trade surplus shrank to the lowest level in a year in February as a surge in imports signalled the nation may start to outshine the U.S. as a destination for the world’s goods.” The customs bureau reported on the same day that imports rose by 44.7 percent from a year ago to a surplus of $7.61 billion, and exports gained 45.7 percent.

China generally processes raw materials and partially finished goods to export to the rest of the world. Her main exports to EU (20.4%), US (17.7%), Hong Kong (13.4%), Japan (8.1%) are office and data processing equipments ($134.5 billion), telecommunications equipments (123.6 billion), electrical machines (101.7 billion), apparel & clothing (95.4 billion) and other manufactured products (55.5 billion).

Her imports are mainly from Japan (13.3%), EU (11.7%), South Korea (10.9%), Taiwan 9.1% and US (7.2%) and they are electrical equipments ($174.8 billion), petroleum & related goods (84.1), scientific instruments (48.6), minerals and scrap (44.0), office and data processing equipments (40.7).

The jobless rate in China was estimated to be 4.0% in 2009 according to “PRC Unemployment News”, exxun.com dated Jan 2010. This is the official data for urban areas only; and the rate would rise to 9% if migrants are included.

China is a potential superpower as it currently holds the world’s third largest economy by nominal GDP and the second largest by GDP (PPP) with an economy that is projected to grow further in the long term. Having the world’s largest standing army, with the second-largest defence budget, China is also identified as a nuclear weapons state and currently is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In addition, China is also a member of multilateral organizations such as the WTO, G-20 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and is also a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

Historically, many Chinese languages and dialects were created and had evolved due to the existence of many clans in China. After the unification of all these clans under the Qin dynasty, Mandarin began to emerge as the language among the elites during the Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644).

The importance of Mandarin, which was based on the Beijing dialect, was maintained as the official language of the court when the Capital of China moved from Nanjing to Beijing in the latter part of the Ming Dynasty, and remained in Beijing during the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1912). In 1909, that Mandarin became 国语(guó yǔ), the national language of China.

In 1912, the Republic of China maintained Mandarin as the official language even though the Qing Dynasty ended its reign. It was renamed 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà) which means common language in 1955 while Taiwan maintained the term 国语 (guó yǔ) which means national language. Since then, Standard Mandarin has been widely used in China as the official language for mass media communication, administration, politics, education, commerce and other nationwide dealings above all other dialects.

Worth Knowing

Chinese Translation services

Chambers provides chinese translation services for a number of fields including legal chinese translation services, medical chinese translation services, technical chinese translation services, and financial chinese translation services. Chambers also provides chinese Interpreting services, includes Consecutive chinese Interpretation, Simultaneous chinese Interpretation and whispering chinese Interpretation.

Mandarin Translation Services

Chambers provides mandarin translation services for a number of fields including legal mandarin translation services, medical mandarin translation services, technical mandarin translation services, and financial mandarin translation services. Chambers also provides mandarin Interpreting services, includes Consecutive mandarin Interpretation, Simultaneous mandarin Interpretation and whispering mandarin Interpretation.

The taxation system in China is complex and subject to frequent change. Therefore, investors are recommended to hire a local tax consultant from a reputable firm to avoid any pitfalls. Tax concessions and exemptions can vary to a large extent depending on the location of the start up business in China. Other factors to consider, includes the industry category your business will be allocated to and the legal structure of the start up in China. Also, income tax paid by employees is determined by the terms and conditions of the employment contract. Experienced Chinese Translators and Chinese Interpreters for Chinese Translation Services:

We can help you reach the Chinese market, if you need experienced and qualified Chinese translators and Chinese interpreters who understand your target audience, please contact our translation centre on +65 63391886. for Chinese translation services .