Chinese is written with characters known as 漢字 [汉字] (hànzi). Each character represents a syllable of spoken Chinese and also has a meaning. The characters were originally pictures of people, animals or other things but over the centuries they have become increasingly stylised and no longer resemble the things the represent. Many of the characters are actually compounds of two or more characters.

Chinese is a family of closely-related but mutually unintelligible languages. These languages are known variously as fāngyán (regional languages), dialects of Chinese or varieties of Chinese. In all over 1.2 billion people speak one or more varieties of Chinese. Mandarin is by far the most used dialect, followed by Wu, Yue (Cantonese), Min Nan and Jinyu. Chinese is spoken in many countries including Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand.

China and South East Asia are areas of major economic expansion, so there is a high demand for translation to and from Chinese.

Chinese is one of the major languages for international business. Chinese is one of the more frequently translated languages by Comms Multilingual. Chinese translation projects have included work on advertisements, brochures, instructions for mobile phones, scripts, manuals, commercial documents, newsletters, typesetting and web sites.