Adding Chinese to Your Website: Traditional or Simplified, and What It Really Takes

If you're expanding into Taiwan or Hong Kong, or you have more and more Chinese-speaking customers at home, a Chinese version of your website can make you far easier to choose. But it's more than pasting your pages into a translator. You have to make three decisions first: which Chinese, how much of the site, and who writes it. Get those right and the rest is mostly careful work.

I work in English and Chinese. My own site has an English version and a Traditional Chinese version, with a Simplified Chinese option in the language menu, and my Chinese blog is written separately for readers in Taiwan rather than translated from the English one. Here's what I'd tell a business planning the same.

Decision 1: Traditional or Simplified?

Written Chinese comes in two scripts, and choosing the wrong one is the fastest way to look like an outsider.

• Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau
• Simplified Chinese is used in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia

If you're targeting one of those places, the choice is made for you. If you're serving Chinese-speaking customers in your own country, in Vancouver, Sydney or London for example, it depends on where they or their families come from. Ask a few of them, or look at the language report in your analytics if you have one. Some businesses end up needing both.

Even within Traditional Chinese, Taiwan and Hong Kong use different words for some everyday things, and Hong Kong readers often expect a different tone. If one of them is your main market, have someone from there read the final text.

It isn't a font switch

There are tools that convert Traditional characters to Simplified and back, and they get the characters mostly right. What they don't fix is vocabulary. Taiwan and mainland China often use different words for the same thing:

• Software: 軟體 in Taiwan, 软件 in mainland China
• Video: 影片 in Taiwan, 视频 in mainland China
• Internet: 網路 in Taiwan, 网络 in mainland China
• Quality: 品質 in Taiwan, 质量 in mainland China

A converted page can be perfectly readable and still feel foreign to the person reading it. Conversion is a reasonable first draft for the second script. A person who knows the market should check it.

Decision 2: How much of the site?

You don't need to translate everything at once. Start with the path a new customer takes to contact you:

1. Your homepage
2. The service pages that matter in the new market
3. How pricing or the process works
4. Your contact page, form labels and error messages
5. The confirmation message and any automatic reply emails
6. Your privacy policy, if you collect personal details through the form

Old blog posts and news can wait. What you shouldn't do is half-translate a page, with a Chinese menu around English content, or English and Chinese side by side. Google's own guidance for multilingual sites is to use one language for the content and navigation on each page, because it works out a page's language from the visible text.

Decision 3: Translate, localise, or write new?

There are three levels, and most good bilingual sites mix them.

Machine translation. Fast and cheap, and it reads like a translation. Fine for internal documents. Risky for the pages that are supposed to persuade someone to hire you.

Localisation. A translator who knows the market adapts the text: local examples, units, currency, date formats, phone number formats, and how formal to be.

Writing new. Headlines, calls to action and anything that sells usually need to be rewritten from scratch for the new audience. What makes a customer in Taipei trust a business isn't always what works in Toronto. That's why my Chinese blog has its own topics: the questions Taiwanese small business owners ask aren't the same as the ones my overseas readers ask.

Contact methods change too

A Chinese page with only an English email form will lose people. Look at how customers in your target market actually get in touch:

• In Taiwan, LINE is widely used for talking to businesses
• In Hong Kong, WhatsApp is common
• In mainland China, WeChat is the default

Offer the channel people already use, and make sure someone can reply in Chinese, or say clearly in which language you'll reply.

Design details that catch people out

• Chinese text is denser. One character carries more meaning than one English letter, so the same message takes less space. Layouts designed around long English headlines can look empty in Chinese, and buttons sized for short Chinese labels can overflow in English. Design for both from the start.
• Size and spacing. Chinese characters need a slightly larger size and more generous line spacing to stay readable on a phone.
• No italics. Chinese doesn't have true italics, so emphasis that relies on them disappears. Use bold or colour.
• Punctuation. Chinese uses full-width punctuation, such as ，and 。, which takes a full character's width.
• Fonts are heavy. A Chinese font contains thousands of characters, so a full web font can be very large and slow on mobile. Use the fonts already on the visitor's device, or a font cut down to the characters you use.

Help search engines find the right version

• Give each language its own address, such as yoursite.com/zh/ for Chinese, rather than switching languages on the same URL
• Add hreflang annotations so Google knows which pages are versions of each other, as Google's documentation recommends
• Put a visible language switch on every page, so a visitor who lands on the wrong version can change it
• Write the page titles and descriptions in Chinese too, not just the body text

If mainland China is your target, that's a separate project. Google isn't available there, and reaching customers in mainland China involves different search engines and its own rules for hosting. It's outside the scope of this article.

The cost, and the ongoing work

A second language is close to a second site's worth of content to manage. Every new service, price change and announcement needs doing twice, and the Chinese version is often the one that falls behind. Before you start, decide who will update it.

That's also why my fixed packages cover one language. In my website cost calculator, choosing two languages shows a custom quote rather than a package price. For a single-language site, my packages start at US$800 for one page, US$1,200 for a redesign and US$2,000 for a custom service website. There's more on what moves a quote in what a small business website costs.

Before you start: a checklist

1. Which market, and so which script: Traditional or Simplified?
2. Which pages a new customer needs, in order
3. Who writes or checks the Chinese, and who from the target market reads it
4. Which contact channels customers there use, and who replies
5. Separate URLs, hreflang and a language switch
6. Who keeps the Chinese version up to date

Working with me on it

Because I work in both languages, I can plan the structure once for both audiences, write or adapt the Chinese copy, and design layouts that hold up in each. I work remotely; my page on international web design explains how, and if you're weighing up a designer in another country, this checklist will help.

If you already have a website, send it for a free website audit, and mention which Chinese-speaking market you're aiming at. You'll get 3 to 5 practical improvements, and they're worth fixing before the site is doubled into two languages. When you're ready, start a project.