Comprehensive Human Translation Resources

Language Focus

• ATW mainly focuses on the Asian languages.
• East Asian Languages: Chinese, Korean, Japanese.
• Southeast Asian Languages: Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog (Philippine).
• Other Asian Languages: Lao, Burmese, Hmong, etc.

Simplified Chinese (Mandarin)
Simplified Chinese is one of the two standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. It is used in mainland China and read by people who speak Mandarin. Mandarin is the spoken standard of people in mainland China. It is also the official language of China that is used by the largest population in the world.

Traditional Chinese (Overseas Chinese, Singapore)
Traditional Chinese is another standard character set for Chinese. It is commonly used in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and overseas Chinese communities. It is the most recognized written Chinese form, which could be read by all Chinese speakers.

Traditional Chinese HK (Cantonese)
Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese (廣東話, 广东话; originally known as廣州話, 广州话), is the dialect of Yue, Chinese is spoken in the vicinity of Canton (Guangzhou) in southern China. It is the traditional prestige dialect of Yue. Cantonese is the spoken language of the Cantonese people mainly from Hong Kong, Macao and overseas Cantonese people.

Traditional Chinese TW (Taiwan)
Traditional Chinese TW is the written standard of the Traditional Chinese used in Taiwan only. The terms and usage are slightly different from Traditional Chinese and the target audience are for the Taiwan people.

Japanese
Japanese is the spoken and written standard for Japanese. It has no genetic relationship with Chinese, but it makes extensive use of Chinese characters or kanji (漢字), in its writing system, and a large portion of its vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese. Along with kanji, the Japanese writing system primarily uses two syllabic scripts, Hiragana and Katakana. Latin script is used in a limited fashion, i.e. for imported acronyms, and the numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals alongside traditional Chinese numerals.

Korean
Korean is the official language of both South Korea and North Korea, as well as one of the two official languages in China’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. Korean is an agglutinative language. The Korean language is traditionally considered to have nine parts of speech. For details, see Korean parts of speech. Modifiers generally precede the modified words, and in the case of verb modifiers, can be serially appended. The basic form of a Korean sentence is subject–object–verb, but the verb is the only required and immovable element.

Vietnamese
Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language that originated in the north of Vietnam and is the national and official language of the country. It is the native language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a first or second language for the many ethnic minorities of Vietnam. As a result of the Vietnamese emigration and cultural influence, Vietnamese speakers are found throughout the world, notably in East and Southeast Asia, North America, Australia and Western Europe. Vietnamese has also been officially recognized as a minority language in the Czech Republic.

Tagalog
Tagalog is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by a quarter of the population of the Philippines and as a second language by the majority. Its standardized form, officially named Filipino, is the national language and one of two official languages of the Philippines, the other being English.

It is related to other Philippine languages, such as the Bikol languages, Ilokano, the Visayan languages and Kapampangan, and more distantly to other Austronesian languages, such as the Formosan languages, Indonesian, Hawaiian, and Malagasy.

Malay
Malay (Bahasa Melayu) is a major language of the Austronesian family. It has an official status in Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. It is spoken by 270 million people across the Malacca Strait, including the coasts of the Malay Peninsula of Malaysia and the eastern coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, and has been established as a native language, part of western coastal Sarawak and West Kalimantan in Borneo.

As the Bahasa Kebangsaan or Bahasa Nasional (National Language) of several states, Standard Malay has various official names. In Singapore and Brunei, it is called Bahasa Melayu (Malay language); in Malaysia, Bahasa Malaysia (Malaysian language); and in Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language) and the Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (“unifying language/lingua franca”). However, in areas of central to southern Sumatra where the language is indigenous, Indonesians refer to it as Bahasa Melayu and consider it as one of their regional languages.

Indonesian
Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) is the official language of Indonesia. It is a standardized register of Malay, an Austronesian language that has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries. Most Indonesians also speak one of more than 700 indigenous languages.

Indonesia is the fourth most populous nation in the world. Of its large population, the majority speak Indonesian, making it one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.

Khmer
Khmer or Cambodian is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. With approximately 16 million speakers, it is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language (after Vietnamese). Khmer has been influenced considerably by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious registers, through the vehicles of Hinduism and Buddhism. The more colloquial registers have influenced, and have been influenced by Thai, Lao, Vietnamese and Cham, all of which, due to geographical proximity and long-term cultural contact, form a sprachbund in peninsular Southeast Asia.  It is also the earliest recorded and earliest written language of the Mon–Khmer family, predating Mon and by a significant margin Vietnamese, due to Old Khmer being the language of the historical empires of Chenla, Angkor and, presumably, their earlier predecessor state, Funan.