Chinese-Simplified Subtitling Services

Chinese subtitling services

Matinée Multilingual offers an affordable Chinese subtitling service for your business video content. We've more than 25 years’ experience in delivering TRANSLATIONS, VOICE-OVERS, SUBTITLES & CAPTIONS in over 80 languages.

Our Chinese subtitling service level will delight you. All the work is done in-house, at our base in Reading, apart from translations which we subcontract to in-country linguistic experts. With Matinée you are buying our service quality and our expertise.

We guarantee to deliver the best, no nonsense Chinese subtitles service anywhere in the UK. Whatever the challenge, we guarantee to deliver and delight. Check out our FAQs for more information and costs.

Call us now on +44(0)118 958 4934 or email project@matinee.co.uk. You can also use the Quick Quote form opposite for an instant response.

CSR paper-thin Bluetooth Keyboard promo – Chinese subtitling

CSR required Chinese video translation and Chinese subtitles for their “paper-thin Bluetooth keyboard” promotional video. Matinée provided audio transcription, translation, animation, video editing and subtitling services to re-version the on-screen captions into Chinese and produce the Simplified Chinese subtitles. The final video was encoded in .mp4 format and was well received by the client.

A short history of the Chinese language

Chinese consists of a group of related varieties or dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible, therefore it is often described as a family of languages. All varieties of Chinese are part of the Sino-Tibetan language family.

In Chinese there is a clear difference between the written language (wen) and the spoken language (yu). The relationship between the two is complicated, partly because the spoken varieties of the language evolved at different rates, while written Chinese has not changed as much.

Although there are many different Chinese dialects, standard written Chinese is understood by most Chinese speakers as it is based on the standard spoken language (Mandarin).

Written Chinese is one of the oldest writing systems in the world still in use today, originating in the late Shang Dynasty (1200-1050 BC). Its characters gradually evolved and were standardised during the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC).

In the 20th century, written Chinese divided into two forms, known as simplified and traditional. Simplified Chinese was developed to make the characters easier to write and memorise – it is now the standard written form of the language. Traditional Chinese is still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as by calligraphy artists.

Which countries have Chinese as a national language?

Mandarin is the official language of the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. It is one of four official languages in Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Cantonese remains one of the official languages of the special administrative regions of China – Hong Kong (with English) and Macau (with Portuguese). It is also widely spoken in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong (where it originated), as well as in overseas communities (eg in Malaysia).

Of all the Chinese dialects, only Mandarin and Cantonese are designated as official.

How many people speak Chinese as their first language?

Chinese – in one or other of its varieties – is spoken as a first language by over one billion people. This is around a fifth of the world’s total population. Of these, over 900 million speak Mandarin.

Did you know…

There are over 50,000 Chinese characters, although only around 10,000 are in common use today. A knowledge of 2,000 characters is defined as functional literacy among Chinese workers, while well-educated readers would typically recognise around 4-6,000 characters.
Chinese characters can be written in any direction on a square grid. Traditionally the language was written in columns, from top to bottom, right to left, with no punctuation. From the mid-20th century, left to right writing, punctuation and rows began to appear. Shop signs can be particularly confusing, as traditional and modern layouts are both common.
Chinese characters once formed the basis for the writing systems of Vietnam, Korea and Japan. Today written Japanese is a composite of Chinese characters and syllabic Japanese scripts (kana). Chinese characters are rarely used in South Korea now, and not at all in North Korea (replaced with the Hangul alphabet). Vietnamese now uses a Latin-based alphabet.

The Chinese economy

China is the world’s second largest economy, after the United States. It is the world’s fastest-growing economy, averaging growth rates of around 10% per year for the past 30 years.

China is the largest manufacturing economy in the world, the largest exporter and the second largest importer.

However, it also remains a developing country, with the second highest number of poor people in the world after India. Over a million Chinese people live below the national poverty line of RMB 2,300 per year (about $1.8 per day).

This video montage features a variety of subtitling projects we have completed in a number of languages. It also shows four different ways in which the subtitles can be displayed on screen.