The Importance Of Dialect In Translation

When you’re looking to hire a translation service provider, you should be sure to find someone that will focus on the details—Details such as the differences in dialect.

To demonstrate the importance of this, the following are a couple examples of dialect differences for the same language.

Mandarin & Cantonese

Mandarin and Cantonese are not different languages. They’re both dialects of the same language—Chinese. That they’re different languages is a very common misconception. Given that, you’ll want to bring a translator onto your team that can sight and handle the slight, but clear, differences in translating into target dialects. They should have a good understanding of the importance for the small variations.

Cantonese, the dialect that the majority of China speaks, is also 1 of 4 languages spoken in Singapore. However, despite the fact that most of mainland China uses Cantonese, interestingly enough, there’s still a relatively small speaking population of it worldwide.

Mandarin is made up of numerous smaller dialects spread across Asia, which is why it’s the language dialect used most worldwide.

Mandarin is made up of numerous smaller dialects spread across Asia, which is why it’s the language dialect used most worldwide.

The differences between Cantonese and Mandarin are spoken. However, when written, there are no differences among them. Therefore, asking your LSP to translate a written newspaper from Cantonese to Mandarin, or vice versa, there wouldn’t actually be a job on the table. There would be nothing for the translator to do.

Therefore, a crucial thing for your dialect specialized translator to know is that, having a pen and paper for this type of translation could prevent a lot of difficulties with this translation. As written words are identical in each language, you could, technically, translate from one dialect to the other through a round-about means, by having the source speakers actually write the content, project or translation down.

Arabic

Arabic is a copse of spoken dialects, as well as a standard written language. Spoken dialects, similar to that of Mandarin and Cantonese, can have important linguistic differences from the written form of the language. This, many translators can tell you, may add some difficulties to translating projects.

Your translation service provider must have a clear understanding of the difference in Arabic regional dialects. The most difficult part of this will likely be the industry specific terms the translator must wade through. These need to be translated carefully and in order to do so, some research might be required by the translator. To avoid any issues with inaccuracy or uncertainty within translations, you may want to bring on a translator with some specialization in the field and dialect of your target language.