Chinese

The Chinese (opens in a new tab) language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family (opens in a new tab), which is very much different from the Latin script languages. About 1.4 billion people, or 17% of the world's population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.

Linguistics

Character Set

The Chinese characters (opens in a new tab) and the Latin characters (opens in a new tab) represent two fundamentally different approaches to written language.

The Latin characters has a limited character set, where relatively few characters are needed to represent a large vocabulary, each character represents a specific sound or phoneme (opens in a new tab), and words are formed by combining these characters in specific sequences. Chinese, on the other hand, has tens of thousands of characters in order to express the full range of the Chinese language, each character represents a morpheme (opens in a new tab) or word, often conveying meaning directly, and words are formed by combining individual characters, each with its own meaning and pronunciation.

This fundamental difference in writing systems has significant implications for language learning, text processing, and cultural exchange. While the Latin characters are relatively easy to learn and use, the Chinese characters requires significant memorization and practice.

PPResume has invested (opens in a new tab) heavily in supporting Chinese resumes.

Variants

While there are many regional variations of the Chinese language, the two primary written forms are Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

Here's a breakdown:

Simplified Chinese

• Primarily used in mainland China and Singapore.
• Developed in the mid-20th century to increase literacy rates.
• Uses simplified characters (opens in a new tab), often with fewer strokes than traditional characters.

Traditional Chinese

• Primarily used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and many overseas Chinese communities.
• The older form of written Chinese.
• Uses traditional characters (opens in a new tab), with more and complex strokes.

It's important to note that both Simplified and Traditional Chinese can be used to write various dialects of Chinese, such as Mandarin (opens in a new tab), Cantonese (opens in a new tab), and Hokkien (opens in a new tab).

Meanwhile, Traditional Chinese has at least two variants, namely, the Hong Kong variant zh-HK (opens in a new tab) and the Taiwan variant zh-TW (opens in a new tab). Most of the scripts in zh-HK and zh-TW are identical, with only a few minor differences.

For example, the word "software", when translated to zh-HK, it is "軟件", while in zh-TW, it is "軟體". There are about tens of words in English that are translated differently in zh-HK and zh-TW, details here (opens in a new tab).

In general, PPResume can't do too much for the difference between zh-HK and zh-TW, as users have to decide which variant to use when writing resumes and make sure that the content conforms to the idioms and convensions of zh-HK or zh-TW. However, there is one thing that PPResume needs to handle properly for zh-HK and zh-TW, as some countries and regions have different names in zh-HK and zh-TW. Saudi Arabia (opens in a new tab), for example, is translated as "沙特阿拉伯" in zh-HK and "沙烏地阿拉伯" in zh-TW. There are also a few other countries. PPResume takes care of all countries and regions that has different translations in zh-HK and zh-TW.

Idioms

Date

Dates are presented differently in English and Chinese, e.g. "Jun 2018 – Present" in English should be translated as "2018 年 6 月至今" in Chinese，the position of the year and month should be reversed, and the en-dash "–" should be replaced by "至".

Meanwhile, Chinese do not use dedicated words for months, instead, it uses a combination of an Arabic number and a character "月", making it as simple as a game of counting.

Location

Address formats differ between English and Chinese conventions. Unlike English, when presenting a location with address, city, and country, the general part (country, state, etc.) usually comes first in Chinese, while the most specific part (town, address, etc.) comes last.

Typesetting

Font

Just like Latin script languages, Chinese has its serif font Song and sans-serif font Bold. Besides, it also has two additional font styles, Regular and Fangsong. You can check Guide -> Font -> CJK Font for more details.

PPResume uses Song as the main font for Chinese resumes.

Punctuations

Chinese punctuations, like the language itself, has its own unique characteristics. One important distinction to note is the difference between half-width and full-width (opens in a new tab) punctuations.

The primary difference between half-width and full-width punctuations in Chinese lies in their visual width and their intended use.

Half-width punctuations

• Narrower: these punctuations are typically used in conjunction with Latin characters or numbers, such as in URLs, email addresses, or code snippets.
• Less common: they are less commonly used in standard Chinese text, often used in a small portion of Latin script language phrases or paragraphs.

Full-width punctuations

• Wider: these punctuations are designed to match the width of Chinese characters, ensuring a visually balanced and consistent appearance in Chinese text.
• More common: they are the standard punctuation marks used in Chinese text.

Using the correct type of punctuations is crucial for proper formatting and readability in Chinese text. Mismatched punctuations can lead to visual inconsistencies and potential confusion.

By understanding the difference between half-width and full-width punctuations, you can ensure that your Chinese text is correctly formatted and visually appealing. Here is a table of punctuations in both half-width and full-width forms, used in Latin script and Chinese languages respectively.

For resumes, it's the author's duty to use correct punctuations when composing the content, but PPResume can guarantee that our resume templates will always use the correct punctuations. We have two cases right now:

Comma

English uses the comma , as a separator to separate parts of a sentence and items in a list, while Chinese uses a Chinese comma ， to separate sensences, and a dedicated enumeration comma (顿号 (opens in a new tab), 、) to separate items in a list (e.g. keyword list).

With PPResume's TagsInput (opens in a new tab) component for the input of keywords and courses, the correct seperator punctuations are used according to the main language of the resume.

Colon

English and Chinese also have different (opens in a new tab) colons. The English colon (opens in a new tab) is :, with Unicode U+003A, while the Chinese colon (opens in a new tab) is ：, with Unicode U+FF1A. As you can always trust, PPResume also takes care of this. We use correct colon for various fixed terms like "Keywords:" ("关键字：" in Simplified Chinese, "關鍵字：" in Traditional Chinese) and "Courses:" ( 课程： in Simplified Chinese, 課程： in Traditional Chinese) in our resume template.

Old Style Numbers

By default, PPResume do not use old style numbers for Chinese resumes. Why? Because Chinese characters all have the same height and width (that is why Chinese characters are also called "方块字", which means square characters), basically all Chinese characters are titled and monospaced by nature. By adopting numbers in the lining style, the number style is adapted more closely to the Chinese characters.

Italics

By default, PPResume do not use italics in Chinese resumes because italics in Chinese is considered as a bad practice (opens in a new tab), why?

In Latin script languages, italics are usually distinguished from body serifs and are used to emphasise or differentiate parts of the text, however, italicizing Chinese characters can disrupt the natural flow and readability of the text.

Unlike Latin characters, Chinese characters are square characters that are not traditionally written in italics, and many Chinese fonts do not have specific italic glyphs for each character. When italicizing Chinese text, software often simply slants the characters, which can result in a visually unpleasant and unprofessional appearance.

Translations

PPResume adopts the following translations for various options and terms used in Chinese resumes.

Education Degrees

Languages

Language Fluencies

Location (Countries and Regions)

Section Names

Skill Levels

Terms