The history of East Asian character sets and their importance in the modern business world
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Since around 1000 BC people in the far east have used characters to represent the syllables that form words. Chinese, Japanese and Korean all used variations of these characters, often referred to as Chinese characters whichever language they are relating to. The Vietnamese have previously used a version of the characters as well, although now the Vietnamese alphabet is based on the Latin.
The formation of the script that is the basis for the one used today started in the Han Dynasty (202B.C. - 220A.D) and over the centuries the set of characters has grown. The numbers of characters in the Shuowen Jiezi dictionary from 100 A.D. was 9353, this has now grown significantly. In the Zhonghua Zihai dictionary from 1994, this had grown to 85568 characters, although many are not used any more. The characters are still commonly used throughout China and Japan today with the Chinese government recently approving the use of the characters in domain names.
The increased use of these characters, and the expansion in international business means that companies need to have a way to deal with documents in many different languages and written using different character sets. Although many businesses now use the Roman alphabet, there are still business documents that are written in Chinese characters. Websites, domain names and even some newspapers use the characters, with many foreigners not being able to read and interpret them. Within businesses it is important that documents can be read by any member of the team working on a project. If a document was sent in Chinese characters however, it would need to be translated in most cases. With the thousands of characters, documents written using the pictograms are very difficult to translate using a simple matching method and require a more specialised system to translate. The only way to guarantee a correct translation is for them to be looked at by a human.
Interlingua Translations provide both /www.interlinguatranslations.eu/chinese-translation.html“>Chinese Translation and Japenese Translation from and into both Roman and Chinese alphabet documents. With specialist in many fields, Interlingua will provide your business with an accurately translated document ready for use in your organisation.
<a href="http://www.starsol.co.uk/profiles/fiona-dutton.html" target="_blank">Fiona Dutton</a> is part of the team at Starsol Ltd who provide web marketing services for Interlingua Translations. Interlingua offer a professional translation and related services for businesses and governments, including <a href="http://www.interlinguatranslations.eu/interpreting.html">interpreting</a>.
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