Booming Business In Shanghai Keeps Shanghai Translation Companies Busy

As one of the world’s leading centres of finance and trade, the city of Shanghai in China is a natural magnet for various multinational corporations. A mere fishing and textiles town a few centuries ago, Shanghai has become a truly global city, thanks to the relentless improvement efforts of its government in the past few decades.

Decisions made in Shanghai have significant implications across China’s own sphere of economic influence. Of course, it immensely adds to your significance if you happen to be the most populous city in a country that is home to about a billion people, right? And Shanghai translation services offered here by well-established language translation agencies are known for their rigorous dedication to top-notch quality and competency.

China itself is on a continued economic upswing, so naturally, all its major cities offer some measure of success to any savvy business entity. Most multinational corporations maintain headquarters in Shanghai, and for good reasons. You establish a powerful presence in the city, and all the rest of the region will seem manageable.

It is therefore common to find big names with gleaming offices here, such as Japanese, German, French, Italian and American corporations. And as usual, whenever you have multinational corporations trying to do business, you will also see them working with some Shanghai translation services company.

Imagine the sheer volume of materials these Shanghai translation companies work on every single day, year after year. Consider Japanese giant Hitachi, for example: each one of its hundreds or products is accompanied by a product manual, user’s guide, advertising and marketing collaterals, internal communication to a local Chinese staff. Perhaps, the work includes regular updates on the Hitachi website that is already localized to “speak” to the Chinese.

The sheer volume of translation orders is enormous. And we are speaking of only a single company. In Shanghai, there are hundreds, even thousands of such business entities, all trying to carve their own niche under the sun.

As a centre of culture and literature, Shanghai is also home to the largest Shanghai translation companies. It is in this city where you will find the country’s biggest translation companies that double as publishing houses, often working on localizing international titles from world-renowned authors, such as Ernest Hemingway, JK Rowling, Herman Hesse, William Faulkner, and countless others.

In fact, there is one Shanghai translation company that even churns out hundreds of titles a year, majority of which are international works (novels, textbooks, poetry books, and movies) translated into Chinese or any other of the Chinese language’s varieties. Consequently, the massive operations of such translation companies in Shanghai greatly keep the entire population of the country well-updated on the latest from around the world.

As an aside, there is also some sort of “dark side” to Shanghai translation operations: sometimes one will find, for example, a rather “different” version of a book like Harry Potter. And by “different” we mean, the story, the plot, even the characters are “changed” to suit the local sensibilities. One can even find some martial arts scene in there.

But overall, business in Shanghai continues to soldier on. And Shanghai translation companies will continue to serve as their partner in success.