The Asian-American immigrants bring more languages to the US than perhaps all other population segments combined. Just India alone, there are fifteen different languages. Not to mention the multiple dialects spoken by the various subgroups.
While Chinese has tens of dialects (Mandarin and Cantonese are the major two), the written form is the same. They all share the same set of Chinese characters and have the same grammar logics. (FYI, there are more than 10K Chinese characters, but you only need to know ~2500 to comprehend regular newspaper.)
Just like English, however, there are some language variations among regions. Ask for soda and French fries in London will not get you what you expect in New York. Same for Chinese, the fuel we feed the cars is called "gas oil" in Mainland China but "electric oil" in Hong Kong. The situation is further complicated for terms introduced by foreigners. Salad is an example; there are at least five different combinations of the Chinese characters to translate the term phonetically.
Years ago when McDonald's tried to promote its salad to Chinese customers, they gave out couples as pre-print insert to some Chinese newspapers. The Chinese translation they used for the term salad unfortunately was not the most popular used one. If only there were no product pictures, many readers would have no clues what it was about. I later found out that the agency just hired a freelancer for translation. No one at the agency or the client side was able to comment before the insert was printed.
Take away for marketers, especially those do Asian marketing: Don’t rely on one freelance for any translation and copywriting in any language that you are not familiar with.
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