“I hired a student from a local university to do my translation…and it ended up hurting my reputation.”
This was the story I heard from a business contact I met with a couple of weeks ago. He works for a large chemical manufacturer with a presence in China, and they needed their website translated into Chinese. His choice was to hire a local student from China for the job. Once he presented the translation to his Chinese business partners, they weren’t impressed — the errors actually made him and his company look less professional in their eyes.
“Entrepreneurs are keen to communicate with English speaking Chinese directly without an interpreter, or even venture into a few words of Mandarin. Which quite often goes wrong. A pity, because many problems can easily be avoided by calling in an experienced interpreter.” Easier said than done?
The more I learned in China about the contrast between the way folks in the East and the West make use of their names and titles, the more fascinating it seemed, maybe because I think it implies something about the deep differences between our two cultures.
In China, one first identifies oneself in relation to the larger group, then the smaller group, then within the family, and only after that, as an individual. To illustrate this very clearly we only have to look at Chinese names and addresses. When you write someone’s address in China you first write the country, then the province, then the city or locality, followed by the business unit or location of the home. Only after all this, at the bottom, comes the person’s name. And in China, the family name – or surname – comes first; and at the very, very end is the individual’s given name. Just the opposite of us. And confusion abounds when Eastern and Western names collide. Read the rest of “What’s in a Name?” or post a comment
