ABSTRACT
This chapter describes and analyses the Chinese translation market in recent years. A microeconomic framework of 'market' is then put forward and explanations of important concepts such as 'supply', 'demand' and 'market price' provided. The concepts of supply, demand and market price have been used to analyse many behaviours in private and public spheres and more recently to analyse the realms of languages and even translation. Within China, many translation companies, especially those focusing on technical and scientific translation, also began to enter the localisation market. The language pair most commonly found in the Chinese translation market after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 up to the late 1970s was Russian into Chinese. Mandarin is the official language in Taiwan. In contrast to Mainland China, which uses simplified Chinese, in Taiwan traditional Chinese characters are used.
