Translate an employment contract into Chinese (Simplified)

What changes when an employment contract goes into Chinese

Simplified Chinese is written without spaces between words and uses full-width punctuation: commas become ，, full stops 。, colons ：. A clause such as “The Employee agrees to:” becomes 员工承诺：. Quotation marks are rendered as “ ” or 「 」.

Consequences specific to an employment contract:

• Dates run year-month-day: “1 September 2025” becomes 2025年9月1日.
• Nouns have no plural form: “the employee” and “employees” both give 员工 or 劳动者. Where your contract distinguishes one person from a group of staff, context has to carry it.
• Gendered wording disappears: “he/she” or “his/her” constructions collapse into neutral phrasing.
• The parties are often called 甲方 (Party A, usually the employer) and 乙方 (Party B, the employee) in contracts drafted in China.

The text uses two to three times fewer characters than English or French, but each character is wider, so page count changes little and a salary table keeps roughly the same footprint.

Employment law vocabulary: equivalents and false friends

Chinese labour law has its own terminology, which Manuce's legal specialist applies. Common equivalents:

• employment contract: 劳动合同;
• permanent or open-ended contract: 无固定期限劳动合同; fixed-term contract: 固定期限劳动合同;
• probation period: 试用期;
• employer: 用人单位;
• non-compete clause: 竞业限制条款; confidentiality clause: 保密条款;
• severance compensation: 经济补偿;
• collective agreement: 集体合同.

Some source-country concepts have no exact counterpart: at-will employment, a UK garden leave clause, French RTT days or a German Betriebsrat consultation. The translation renders them with a descriptive phrase; it does not turn them into a Chinese mechanism. If the contract is meant to govern an employee in mainland China, have those clauses reviewed by a lawyer familiar with local law: translating a contract does not adapt it to another jurisdiction.

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

Your contract is handled by Thémis, the engine specialised in legal texts. You get back:

• the same file (Word, PDF, RTF, plain text and so on) in its original format, with headings, numbered clauses, tables and signature blocks in place;
• Simplified Chinese text, as used in mainland China and Singapore.

What Manuce does not do:

• No certified translation. If an authority, consulate or court requires a translation certified by a sworn translator, you will need one.
• No Traditional Chinese by default. For an employee in Taiwan or Hong Kong, choose Traditional Chinese, handled as a separate language.
• No scanned PDFs. A signed contract scanned as an image, with no selectable text, cannot be read: upload the Word version or an exported PDF.
• No legal advice and no rewriting of clauses for compliance.

Chinese carries a surcharge: a ×1.6 coefficient applies to the per-word rate, already included in the quote shown on upload.

Preparing the file and checking the Chinese version

Before uploading:

• Use the source Word file where possible, so clause numbers and cross-references (“see clause 7”) stay aligned.
• Check that amounts are consistent in figures and words: contracts in China often state sums in formal capital numerals, such as 人民币壹万元整 for RMB 10,000. Check these after translation.
• If the employer has a registered Chinese company name, keep it to hand: the translation cannot guess it and will transliterate the name or leave it in Latin script.

After delivery:

• Check personal names: “Smith” may stay in Latin letters or be transliterated; make sure it is handled the same way throughout.
• For a bilingual contract, check the governing-language clause, for example 本合同以中文版本为准 (“the Chinese version prevails”): that is the parties' decision, not the translator's.
• Open the file on a computer with Chinese fonts installed: Latin fonts lack these characters, and a poorly equipped machine shows empty boxes.

For a term you want kept as it is (an English job title, a product name), judge it on the free sample, then on the full translation.

In practice

1. Export the contract as Word or a PDF with selectable text.
2. Upload it and choose Simplified Chinese: the quote appears straight away.
3. Read the free sample to judge the terminology (劳动合同, 试用期…).
4. Pay, then download the contract in its original format.
5. Check names, amounts, dates and the governing-language clause before signing.