How do you translate your website into Chinese?

Most guides on this topic sell a plugin or an agency, so they stop at “hire a native speaker.” That’s true, but it doesn’t help you if you can’t read the result.

This guide gives you the method, the rules translators follow and the checks you can run yourself. It’s part of our work on translating and localizing a website for China.

What’s the right way to translate a website into Chinese?

Treat it as a project with seven stages, not a file you send off. Most of the quality is set before translation starts and after it ends.

1. 1DecideAudience, script, scope, tone
2. 2Build keywords and glossary
3. 3Translate
4. 4Revise by a second person
5. 5Check on the live page
6. 6Publish with correct tags
7. 7Maintain when the source changes

The rest of this page follows that order. Globalization Partners, a translation agency, listed a longer version with 16 steps in 2012.⁷

A small site can use a lighter version, as long as no stage disappears.

What should you decide before translation starts?

Four decisions come first, because changing them later means redoing work. Put your answers in writing.

Decision	The question	Where to go next
Audience and script	Who are you writing for: the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong or the diaspora?	Simplified or Traditional, Hong Kong and Taiwan
Scope	Which pages earn their cost?	Which pages to translate first
Tone	Do you address the reader as 你 or 您?	See the rules below
Names	What stays in Latin letters, and do you have a Chinese name?	Choosing a Chinese brand name

Don’t skip the script choice because a tool offers both. Chinese varies by region in vocabulary and punctuation as well as characters, so a page should have one real reader in mind.¹³²¹

Should you do keyword research before or after translating?

Do it first for your pages that need to be found. Published advice is split on this, and neither side offers data.

Nanjing Marketing Group’s default is research first. In one case from 2013, though, it advised translating first and editing for SEO afterward, because the content was already fixed.⁶

It also warned that keywords added later can read unnaturally.

Smartling and Globalization Partners both place keyword work inside the project, without discussing the order.⁷⁸ Our view is reasoning, not measurement:

• Landing pages: Research first, because the page title and headings depend on the term Chinese buyers actually use.
• Supporting pages: Translate first, then adjust the terms, using the glossary.

Who should translate which pages?

Match the method to what a mistake would cost on that page. This split is our recommendation, built on Smartling’s idea of tiers.⁸

Page type	Method	Why
Home, offer, landing pages	Native marketing writer adapts the text, then a second person revises	These pages have to persuade
Service detail, case-style pages	Professional translation, then revision	Accuracy and terms matter most
Help articles, older blog posts	Machine draft, then human post-editing	Volume is high and the risk is lower. Our machine translation guide sets the level by page
Terms, privacy, contracts	Legal translator, with a local adviser	Mistakes have legal weight
Unreviewed machine output	Don’t publish it	Nobody has checked what you’re saying

Revision by a second person isn’t a luxury. Wikipedia calls it an obligatory part of ISO 17100, the translation services standard, and a 2025 ATC note says the standard prescribes it.²²⁵

We read those summaries, not the paid text. If your translator works alone, you’re likely buying less than that standard describes.

The standard is due for revision, and the ATC says one open debate is whether post-editing counts as revision.²⁵ So don’t assume a post-editor is also your second person.

For machine drafts, ISO 18587 covers full human post-editing, and a note in it points to ISO 17100 for general translation.¹⁰

The evidence on machine quality is thin. One 2025 study scored DeepSeek-V3 at 0.7790 and GPT-4o at 0.7655 on English academic text, using an automatic metric, and its authors said native speakers would be needed to judge naturalness.³

Another 2025 study, on Chinese-to-English tourism text, concluded that human post-editing remains necessary.⁹

The closest fit is a 2026 Welocalize study that includes marketing text and Simplified Chinese, but it pools its results across ten languages.²⁷ We found no study that reports English marketing pages going into Simplified Chinese on their own. Our guide on machine translation weighs all of this.

How does the translated text get into your site?

Choose the route before you hire, because it decides what your translators can see. Smartling and TranslatePress both sell routes on this list, so read their descriptions as vendor claims.

Route	How it works	What to watch
Browser translation	Chrome detects the language and offers to translate 8	It creates no Chinese pages of your own. Smartling says not to rely on it 8
Free portal, such as Google Translate	You paste text or a page URL 8	Fine for a rough read, unwieldy at scale 8
CMS plugin, such as TranslatePress on WordPress	A machine draft, then edits made on the page in a visual editor 22	Saved edits go live 22, so decide who approves first
Translation platform linked to your CMS	You send content from inside WordPress or Shopify 8	Check that revision stays in the workflow
Files sent to a translator	You export the text, then load the translation back	Context gets lost, so send live links too

The route changes the handling, not the job. Revision and the live-page check stay the same on all of them.

What should you give your translator?

Give a short pack, and most of the questions never arise. A translator working from a bare file has to guess all of this:

• Purpose: Who reads the page, and what they should do next.
• Glossary: Your product terms, approved Chinese terms, and your target keywords.
• Do-not-translate list: Brand, product and legal names.
• Tone: Your 你 or 您 decision, plus a sample you like.
• Live links: The URL of each page, so text is read in context.
• Fact sheet: What may be changed, and what must stay exact.
• Limits: Claims you can’t make, and proof you can supply.

Build the glossary before the first page. Globalization Partners places glossary development early in its workflow, ahead of editing.⁷

Then ask about method. Smartling, which sells one, recommends tools that show translators how text appears on the site.⁸

Whatever the tool, the aim is the one Microsoft sets out: don’t translate a list of strings without context.¹

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What makes Chinese copy sound translated?

Carrying English habits across does. Microsoft’s Simplified Chinese style guide is the best public reference we found.¹

It was written for Microsoft’s own voice and products, so treat it as a benchmark, not a law.

English habit	Microsoft’s rule	Example from the guide
Word-for-word translation	Avoid it, and split or simplify sentences	“Serious. Fun.” becomes 张弛有度, not 严肃。有趣。
“You” and “your” everywhere	Omit pronouns when the meaning holds, and don’t translate each possessive	“your application” becomes 应用程序, not 你的应用程序
Too many 的	Omit it where the meaning holds	新功能, not 新的功能
Generic counters	Use the specific counter, not always 个	两位研究人员, not 2 个研究人员
Formal connectives	Prefer everyday forms	如果, not 倘若

Microsoft uses 你 rather than 您 when a pronoun is needed, in line with its conversational voice.¹ That’s its brand choice. A law firm or a private bank may land elsewhere, which is why tone belongs in your brief.

Punctuation is also a tell. W3C notes that mainland Chinese uses double quotation marks first, and Taiwan single ones.¹³ Microsoft specifies the Chinese period 。 for Simplified text.¹

Spacing beside Latin text is a smaller detail. W3C describes a gap of at most a quarter of a character between Han and Western letters,¹³ and Microsoft’s examples put a space there too.¹

What has to change besides the words?

Anything that assumes a Western reader. These are the items that a straight translation carries over unchanged.

Item	What goes wrong	What to do
Large numbers	Chinese counts in units of 10,000 (万) and 100 million (亿), so 1 million is 100 万 11	Have the reviser check every figure against the source
Discounts	NN/g, 2017: promotions usually state the percentage of the full price you pay 4	Rewrite: a 20% discount becomes “pay 80%”
Superlatives	“Best” and “the most” are restricted 12	See banned advertising words
Examples and proof	Lack of localization is obvious to local users 4	Use examples for that region
Text in images	Baidu’s 2014 guide says it can’t read text in images 14	Put key messages in live text
Emphasis	Microsoft tells its translators not to carry bold or italics across from the source, though bold headings stay 1	Agree on an emphasis style

Baidu’s guide is from 2014, and nothing we read confirms it still describes its crawler today.

Superlatives need attention from two sides. Article 9 of the Advertising Law bans terms such as “the best,” with exceptions in the 2023 SAMR guidelines.¹²

Microsoft’s guide also says to generally avoid 最好, 最强 and 唯一.¹

Whether that law reaches your site depends on your situation, so ask a local adviser.

Length moves too. Globalization Partners says text contracts going into Chinese while punctuation expands.¹⁵ W3C notes that Chinese often needs more vertical space between lines than Latin text.¹⁶

So don’t assume a layout that fits English will look right. Our guide to website design for Chinese users covers that side.

How do you check quality if you can’t read Chinese?

Use people who owe your translator nothing. None of the guides we read answers this, so the steps below are our own method, not a published standard.

1. Pay for a sample. Commission one real page of about 300 words from each candidate.
2. Ask for the revision trail. The reviser’s changes show whether revision happened at all.
3. Hire an independent reader. Choose a native speaker in your target region who has no link to the translator.
4. Ask for a cold read. Have them say what the page sells, who it’s for, and whether it sounds written by a local.
5. Ask them to flag, not rewrite. A reviewer may simply prefer other phrasing, so separate errors from taste.
6. Check every fact. Compare numbers, names, prices, dates, and links with the source.
7. Read it on the live page. Look on a phone as well as a desktop, and check menus, buttons, forms and error messages.

Also check line starts. Under the rules W3C recommends, closing punctuation shouldn’t begin a line.¹³

Globalization Partners warns that copy and paste by non-native speakers can break lines.¹⁵

If the reader says it’s correct but foreign, take that seriously. It means revision worked and adaptation didn’t.

How do you publish the translation correctly?

Give the Chinese version its own URLs, and label it properly. Where those URLs sit is a separate choice, covered in subfolder, subdomain or separate site.

Here’s the markup for a Simplified Chinese page, using placeholder URLs:

<html lang="zh-Hans">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/services/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="zh-Hans" href="https://example.com/zh/services/">

• lang on html: W3C says to always declare it there, and never with a meta Content-Language tag.¹⁷
• zh-Hans or zh-CN: W3C says zh-CN was once bent to mean Simplified, and advises tags as short as they can be.¹⁸ Add a region only if you need one.
• hreflang: Google accepts script codes. If two pages don’t point to each other, it ignores the tags, and each version must list itself.¹⁹
• Titles: Baidu’s 2014 guide asks for a unique title on each page, with the important words near the start.¹⁴

Baidu doesn’t document hreflang in the pages we read. SEO guides differ on it: Ahrefs in 2026 and Advance Metrics in 2016 say it isn’t used or supported, while Chinafy says Baidu doesn’t “fully embrace” it.^14202324

Add it for Google anyway. It’s no substitute for a dedicated Chinese version, and we found no Baidu page saying which language signal it reads.

Then plan maintenance before you launch. Decide who updates the Chinese page when the English one changes, and keep the glossary as the single reference.

For a budget, see what a China-ready website costs.

The bottom line

If you remember one thing, make it this: quality comes from the decisions around the translation, and from a second person checking it.

Choose your reader, give your translator a real brief, revise every page that matters, and have someone independent read it on the live site.

How Index in China can help

We translate your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer, as part of getting indexed on Chinese search engines.

We don’t promise rankings, and we’ll tell you if your case needs a local adviser.

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