How do you translate and localize a website for China?

Most guides on this subject are lists of good practices written by companies selling translation. Many repeat numbers with no source, and few tell you what to decide first.

This hub puts those decisions in order and shows where the evidence stops. It’s part of how to be visible in China.

What does localizing a website for China involve?

It means making seven decisions, and translating the text is only one of them. Each has a dedicated guide, so use this table as your map.

Decision	Starting point	Full guide
Which Chinese?	Simplified for the mainland	Simplified or traditional
Which pages?	The pages a buyer needs before contacting you	Which pages to translate first
Who translates?	Any draft, then a human reviewer	How to translate your website
Where does it live?	A subfolder is usually simplest	Site structure
What’s your Chinese name?	Choose it, check it, then protect it	Chinese brand name
What changes on the page?	Mobile, proof, contact options	Website design
What’s the budget?	Price your own word count	What it costs

Localization won’t help if the site doesn’t open. Technical access has its own guide on putting your website in China.

How is localization different from translation?

Translation changes the language. Localization changes what persuades the reader, and that’s what buyers respond to.

Nielsen Norman Group put it plainly after a B2B study in China: “Merely translating into the appropriate language is not enough.”

Users who noticed a site ignoring regional conventions distrusted its products.⁵

The study had 8 participants and dates from 2017, so treat it as a strong hint, not a measurement. It’s still the kind of evidence most guides lack.

So should you translate or rewrite? Reference text can usually be translated. Pages meant to persuade need adapting, like that banner.

Academic work points the same way. A 2024 MIS Quarterly paper ran online experiments in the US and China on three strategies: web similarity, web distinctiveness and web prestige.³⁰

All three had significant impacts on perceived localization. Distinctiveness and prestige were more effective in collectivistic societies.³⁰ We read only the abstract, which doesn’t define the three terms, so don’t read more into them.

Which Chinese should your site use?

Use Simplified Chinese for the mainland, and Traditional Chinese for Hong Kong and Taiwan. The choice also changes your search plan, which most guides skip.

Audience	Script	Punctuation	Leading search engine, October 2026
Mainland China	Simplified, the national standard 4	In the corner, beside the preceding character 15	Baidu 49.00%, Bing 21.69% 1
Hong Kong	Traditional in official use 19	Centered 15	Google 89.59%, Baidu 0.43% 16
Taiwan	Traditional in official use 19	Centered 15	Google 80.02%, Yahoo! 10.9% 17

Baidu isn’t among the 6 engines StatCounter lists for Taiwan.¹⁷ A Traditional version aimed at those markets is mostly a Google project, not a Baidu one.

China’s language law took effect in revised form on January 1, 2026. It names standard characters as the national script, and allows traditional characters in listed cases.⁴

Hong Kong’s government news site shows how one market can use both. Its Simplified pages are translated from Traditional originals, which prevail if they differ.¹⁸

Converting scripts automatically isn’t localizing either. OpenCC, an open-source converter, has separate settings for Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Its Hong Kong phrase setting is still in development.²⁰

See Chinese for Hong Kong and Taiwan for those two markets.

For readers abroad, see how to reach Chinese people living abroad. We found no data on their script preference.

Is machine translation good enough for China?

As a draft, often. As a finished page that asks a buyer to trust you, no. The evidence is thinner than either side suggests.

Source	What was tested	Result	Limit for your site
Welocalize, 2026 34	English into 10 languages including zh-CN, 26% of segments marketing text	Raw output averaged 0.09 to 0.12 serious errors per marketing segment	Figures pooled across languages. The authors work for the firm that built the system
Zou et al., 2025 7	English to Chinese, 11 academic texts, 3,498 sentences	DeepSeek-V3 led on automatic quality scores, GPT-4o on lexical richness	Academic text, machine scoring
Chen and Lin, 2025 8	Chinese to English, 20 tourism texts, 7 raters	ChatGPT 3.87 to 4.07 of 5, DeepL 2.20, Google Translate 1.90	Opposite direction, GPT-3.5
Google, 2026 9	Spam policy	Generating many pages through automated transformations such as translating, with little value to users, is scaled content abuse	Targets scale and value, not translation itself
Baidu, 2014 10	Cheating chapter of its guide	No mention of translation	Old, and silence isn’t approval. An older notice comes closer, see our guide

Chen and Lin still conclude that “human post-editing remains necessary.”⁸ The tools differ widely, so a test run on one tool tells you little about another.

No study we read reports human scores for English-to-Simplified marketing pages on their own. If someone quotes an accuracy figure for your kind of page, ask what text was tested and who scored it.

Our guide on whether machine translation is good enough goes deeper.

Where should the Chinese version live?

Start with a subfolder unless you have a reason not to. Baidu’s own guide supports that, though it was last updated in 2014 and may not reflect current behavior.

Option	Baidu’s guide, 2014	Chinafy, 2024
Subfolder, /zh/	Use a directory until a section can stand alone 13	Shares your authority, weaker local signals 22
Subdomain	Move there once content is rich. Many thin subdomains count as cheating 13	Can be hosted separately 22
.cn domain	The extension has no effect on web search 12	May rank better for local queries 22

The last row is a real disagreement, and we found no recent measurement to settle it. See do you need a .cn domain?.

Hosting abroad isn’t ruled out either. Baidu’s guide says it doesn’t discriminate against overseas sites, provided they’re normally reachable from China.¹¹ A 2017 Baidu page is cooler: it doesn’t recommend overseas servers for Chinese-language sites.³⁵

Read does Baidu index foreign websites? for the detail.

Don’t count on hreflang here. Baidu doesn’t document it in the pages we read, and SEO guides say it ignores the tag or doesn’t fully support it.²¹²²

It’s still worth adding for Google, using zh-Hans or zh-Hant. Each version must list itself and the others, and the links must be reciprocal.¹⁴

What has to change beyond the words?

Start with the phone, page density, your proof and your Chinese name. Most of the published evidence is old, so test your own pages.

• Design for phones first, not phones only. CNNIC counted 1.125 billion internet users in December 2025, and 99.6% used a phone.²³ That counts any phone use: StatCounter still recorded 42.78% desktop traffic in October 2026.³⁶
• Don’t strip the page bare. In a 2016 desktop test, 6 Chinese users tolerated dense sites, but complexity still slowed them down. Reduce it a little, without going minimal.⁶
• Show proof that can be checked. In the 2017 study, participants valued local presence, photos of real products and past projects, case studies and testimonials.⁵
• Offer chat. 5 of the 8 participants used online chat, and preferred it to the phone because it leaves a record.⁵ Baidu’s page rules limit how you show it, as our design guide explains.
• Label your official site. Participants often searched for 官网, “official website.” NN/g suggested putting it in the homepage title.⁵
• Replace what depends on Google. Chinafy, a vendor in this field, says reCAPTCHA doesn’t work reliably in China, which can break forms.³¹ Test yours, then see which Google services fail in China.
• Check how people pay. If you sell online, read accepting Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Your name needs its own decision. China is principally first to file, so the first valid application usually wins, and a Chinese version is a separate application.²⁶

If you don’t choose a name, the public may pick one for you, and it can be unflattering.²⁶

Take this step with a local trademark adviser, starting with how to choose a Chinese brand name.

Baidu’s 2014 guide adds a practical point: if you have a Chinese and an English name, use the one users know in your titles.¹³

Copy also needs a legal check. China’s Advertising Law bars absolute terms such as “the best,” with exceptions set out in 2023 guidelines.³² Our guide to banned advertising words has more, and a local adviser can say whether this reaches your site.

Our guides to earning the trust of Chinese buyers and answering Chinese inquiries pick up from there.

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What does website localization for China cost?

There’s no reliable all-in figure that we could find. The per-word prices below come from vendors. These are their numbers, not ours.

Source	Scope	Figure
Centus, June 2025 23	Human website translation	$0.08 to $0.30 per word
ProZ data, via Centus 23	English to Chinese, average	$0.10 per word
Centus, June 2025 23	Machine translation	$0.01 to $0.05 per word
Centus, June 2025 23	Website localization, average	About $0.40 per word
Chinafy, September 2020 24	About 10,000 words, under ICP application costs	About $412

Centus gives no source for its ranges or its $0.40, which sits above its own translation range. So localization and translation quotes may not be comparable.²³

Chinafy’s figure works out at about $0.04 per word, well below the others. It’s six years old, and Chinafy doesn’t say what text it covers. Its totals of $20,147 and up add a site budget, mostly a local hire, plus ICP work, so they aren’t translation budgets.²⁴

That’s a single reported case, but the fix is simple. Ask how the words are counted, on which text, before you sign.

Our guide to what a China-ready website costs covers the other lines: review, design changes, hosting and upkeep.

Where popular advice goes wrong

Several claims in the guides you’ll find don’t survive a check. Here are four worth knowing before you brief anyone.

Claim	Where it appears	What we found
Baidu has over 70% of search	Chinafy, 2023, citing Nikkei Asia 28	StatCounter shows 49.00% in October 2026.1 The older figure uses another date and may use another method, and the share moves from month to month
An ICP is required to target Chinese audiences	EC Innovations, 2026 29	China Briefing says servers outside the mainland need none, though sites may be slow or intermittently blocked 27
Baidu reads content-language instead of hreflang	Ahrefs, 2026 21	No Baidu source given, and none of the Baidu pages we read mention it
Use red for good luck	Chinafy, 2023 28	It warns against generalizations itself. We found no test of red on Chinese website conversions. In one 2023 study using photos of retail rooms, red walls didn’t beat blue on purchase intention 33

The pattern matters more than any one row. If a guide gives a number with no source and no date, don’t build a budget on it.

The order to work in

Decide before you translate. Changing your script, structure or brand name after translation means paying for part of the work twice.

1. 1Audience and script
2. 2Test access
3. 3Choose pages
4. 4Name and glossary
5. 5URL structure
6. 6Translate and review
7. 7Adapt pages
8. 8Index

1. Pick your audience and script. Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan or readers abroad.
2. Test your current site. Use the China-ready website checklist.
3. Choose your first pages. Start small.
4. Settle your name and glossary. Do this before anyone translates.
5. Fix your URL structure. Moving pages later costs more than deciding now.
6. Translate and review. Keep a human reader on pages that sell.
7. Adapt the pages. Mobile, proof, chat and forms.
8. Get indexed. See Baidu SEO and which Chinese search engines to target.

Every guide on localizing for China

Here’s the full set, grouped by the question you’re trying to answer.

Choose your Chinese

• Simplified or traditional Chinese for your website?
• Chinese for Hong Kong and Taiwan

Translate

• Which pages to translate first
• How to translate your website into Chinese
• Is machine translation good enough for China?

Build the Chinese site

• Subfolder, subdomain or separate site for China?
• Website design for Chinese users

Name and budget

• How to choose a Chinese brand name
• What a China-ready website costs

The bottom line

If you remember one thing, make your decisions before you buy translation. Script, pages, structure and name all shape the job.

Keep a native reviewer on what you publish, and be skeptical of any number without a source and a date.

How Index in China can help

We translate your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer. We then work on getting it indexed on Chinese search engines and send a monthly report on Chinese traffic.

We’ll tell you if your case needs a local adviser. Book a 30-minute call.

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