Chinese ⇄ 200+ language pairs

Chinese written
in the market it is for.

The demand in this direction is mostly your language into Chinese, for readers inside China. Our linguists live in that market, and they are paid at rates that market sets — a deep pool of qualified technical translators competing hard for work. You get the team that does the job, at the price the job costs here.

77% of published cases are Chinese ⇄ English15 partner languages in published workRates published in full

How Chinese usually reaches your project

This is not a secret in the industry, but it is rarely spelled out to the buyer.

  1. 01You brief a language vendorUsually one based in your own market, handling every language in the programme.
  2. 02The Chinese portion is passed onFor most vendors outside China, Chinese work is subcontracted rather than done in-house.
  3. 03A team in China does the workThis is the step where the Chinese is actually read and written.
  4. 04It travels back the same wayEvery hand-off adds margin, adds turnaround, and adds a place for a question to go unasked.

None of this makes the vendor in the middle a bad vendor — coordinating twenty languages is real work. But if the Chinese portion is the part that matters to you, there is no reason it has to travel that far.

Where it actually goes wrong

Correct Chinese and native Chinese
are not the same thing.

Chinese produced by a translator who has been outside the mainland for years is usually accurate term by term, and still reads stiffly to a reader in China. Nothing in it is wrong, so nothing gets flagged — it simply does not sound like it was written for the person reading it. That gap is not closed by proofreading; it is closed by living in the market.

Register that fits the reader

How formal a Chinese sentence should be depends on who is meant to read it — a regulator, an engineer, a consumer. Getting this wrong does not produce an error a reviewer can point at; it produces text that feels off.

Current usage, not remembered usage

Written Chinese moves. Phrasing that was standard business language a decade ago now reads dated, and a translator who left the market keeps writing the Chinese they left with.

Conventions readers expect

Product copy, official filings and user manuals each follow conventions Chinese readers recognise. Matching them is what makes a document read as though it was written here rather than translated into here.

What gets localised, not translated

Units, examples, name order, payment and contact conventions — the parts a literal translation leaves foreign even when every word is right.

The reverse direction has the opposite failure

When Chinese is the source rather than the target, the risk moves upstream: a translator who cannot fully read the Chinese quietly leaves out what they do not recognise, and an omission leaves nothing behind to review.

  • Administrative and political vocabulary常委 · 人大代表 · 居委会 · 村民委员会
  • Internet language that appears and fades within monthsPlatform slang, buzzwords, coded phrasing
  • Regional idiom that reads as ordinary Chinese here
  • Organisations, titles and place references
From our own files

We once put a Chinese-to-Russian speech in the hands of a Russian translator, on the reasoning that a native would produce the most natural Russian. The Russian was fine. What came back was missing pieces — passages and names the translator did not recognise had simply been passed over, including terms specific to China. Nothing in the Russian text signalled that anything was gone. That is the failure this page is about.

Who does which half

Reading a language and writing it are different jobs, and the Chinese side is the one we are placed to do. We staff each direction accordingly rather than asking one person to cover both ends.

Into Chinese — the common direction
Written by linguists living in the Chinese market

The source is usually straightforward; the difficulty is producing Chinese that reads as though it was written for its reader. That is done here, by people who read Chinese every day in the market the text is going to.

Out of Chinese — the reverse
Read here, written by a native in the target market

The Chinese source is read by linguists to whom the vocabulary above is ordinary, so nothing gets quietly dropped. The target text is then produced or reviewed by a native speaker of that language at L3 and L4 — we do not claim to write better Russian than a Russian.

Coverage

Chinese into and out of 200+ languages. The pairs below are the ones that appear in our published case studies — you can check every one of them.

Of 65 published case studies, 58 (89%) involve Chinese and 50 (77%) are Chinese ⇄ English. Browse the case studies →

Published rates

What it costs, before you ask

Chinese ⇄ EnglishL1 Angel AI ReviewL2 Angel ProL3 Angel PremiumL4 Angel Global
USD / 1,000 source words$28$55$92$129

Industry rate guides put technical translation at USD 0.15–0.35 per word in 2026, and European technical work at EUR 150–350 per 1,000 words. Our L3 rate above works out to USD 0.092 per word — published in full, not quoted on request. We have put the numbers side by side; the comparison is yours to make.

Full rate card for every language, plus audio-visual work: see pricing →

If we get it wrong, it is ours

We are the contracting party, not a broker

The work is done by our own team. There is no third party for us to point at if something is wrong, and no chain of vendors for you to unpick.

A named person signs off

Every delivery carries the sign-off of the reviewing expert who checked it. Accountability that cannot be traced to a person is not accountability.

The remedy is in the agreement

What happens if a delivery falls short is written into the contract before work starts, not negotiated afterwards. Industry practice is a refund of the translation fee, and agreements can provide for more.

We take responsibility for the text we deliver. What we do not do is pretend that responsibility is unlimited — a translation supplier who claims exposure far beyond the value of the work is either not reading their own contract or not expecting to honour it. Ours is written down, and we will show it to you before you sign.

Questions buyers ask

Do you only work between Chinese and English?

No. Chinese is one side of the pair; the other side can be most major languages. In our published case studies alone, Chinese appears opposite 15 different languages, including Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic and French.

Who writes the target language — a Chinese linguist?

At L3 and L4 the target text is produced or reviewed by a native speaker of that language. We do not claim that a linguist in China writes better Russian than a Russian. We claim they read the Chinese source better, which is a different question.

Simplified or Traditional Chinese — which do I need?

Simplified for mainland China and Singapore; Traditional for Taiwan and Hong Kong, and those two differ from each other in wording and convention. We quote them separately rather than treating Traditional as one market.

Why are your rates lower than a vendor in Europe or North America?

Two reasons, and neither is a discount. First, cost structure: our linguists are paid at rates set by the Chinese market, which has a deep supply of qualified technical translators and is intensely competitive. Second, one fewer hand-off: you are contracting the team that does the work rather than the team that arranges it, and the margin on that arrangement is real money.

How fast do I get a number?

Tell us about your project. We acknowledge within 4 hours and assign a project manager, then return a formal quote within 24 — large and multi-language programmes included.

Send the Chinese portion straight to the team that will do it.

Tell us about your project. We acknowledge within 4 hours and assign a project manager, then return a formal quote within 24 — large and multi-language programmes included.