Translate your app into 中文
Chinese · ~935M Mandarin native speakers, ~1.3B across all Chinese languages
Chinese is the most-spoken native language in the world and the gateway to the second-largest economy. Mainland China has the largest e-commerce and mobile-payments market on the planet, while Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore represent premium, high-ARPU audiences. A bilingual EN/ZH product is table stakes for taking Asia-Pacific seriously.
Chinese around the world
Chinese is spoken by ~935m mandarin native speakers, ~1.3b across all chinese languages. It is used as an official or working language across 6+ countries and territories.
- China
- Taiwan
- Singapore
- Malaysia
- Hong Kong SAR
- Macau SAR
What you gain from a Chinese locale
Mainland China mobile payments dwarf every other market combined. Even a lightweight zh-CN build opens doors to WeChat, Alipay and Xiaohongshu channels.
Taiwan and Hong Kong are small by population but among the highest-ARPU regions in the world for SaaS and mobile apps.
Over 50 million overseas Chinese speakers across North America, Southeast Asia and Europe actively prefer Chinese-language products.
Shipping Chinese on Localize.to
Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore use Simplified Chinese; Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau use Traditional. They are not interchangeable — create them as distinct target languages on Localize.to.
Import JSON / Android / iOS as usual. Expect Chinese strings to be 30–50% shorter than English visually — check that no UI assumed min-width from the English copy.
Mainland and Taiwanese translators pick different vocabulary for the same English word (e.g. 软件 vs 軟體). Assign each variant to a translator from that region.
Use PingFang SC/TC, Noto Sans CJK, or system fonts. Latin-only webfonts will render Chinese as boxes — ship CJK fallbacks before you ship the locale.
Common questions
They share characters but not vocabulary, and Taiwanese users very visibly notice Mainland wording. If you care about the Taiwan or Hong Kong market, ship zh-TW. If you are purely Mainland-focused, zh-CN alone is fine.
Rarely. Treat zh-CN and zh-TW as two languages with two translators — the same way you would never ask one person to do en-US and en-GB.
Cantonese is primarily a spoken language. Written Hong Kong Chinese uses Traditional characters, so zh-TW (or zh-HK if you want to split it) covers the written UI.
Ready to reach 中文 speakers?
Create a project, add Chinese as a target language, and ship your first localized build today.