Wu Translation Services

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Translation Services USA offers professional translation services for English to Wu and Wu to English language pairs. We also translate Wu to and from any other world language. We can translate into over 100 different languages. In fact, Translation Services USA is the only agency in the market which can fully translate Wu to literally any language in the world!

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Wu Language Facts:

• 80 million native speakers
• Spoken by 1.20% of the world population
• Mainly spoken in China (Zhejiang, Shanghai, southern Jiangsu)
• Part of Chinese language family.

The Wu spoken variations of the Chinese language are spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang; and the municipality of Shanghai. Wu includes Shanghainese, Suzhou, Wenzhou, Hangzhou, Yongkang and Shaoxing dialects. As of 1991, there are 87 million speakers of Wu Chinese, making it the second largest form of Chinese after Mandarin Chinese (which has 800 million speakers).

Wu dialects are notable among Chinese languages in having kept voiced consonants, such as /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/, etc. (These may in fact be better described as voiceless consonants that create a voiced breathy element across the syllable: i.e. /p\/, /t\/, etc). Neither Mandarin nor Cantonese have voiced consonants. Differences in grammar also exist. Wu dialects have a relatively higher amount of Subject-Object-Verb sentence structure than Mandarin or Cantonese. There is huge array of personal and demonstrative pronouns used within the Wu dialects. Sandhi is also extremely complex, and helps parse multisyllabic words and idiomatic phrases. In some cases, indirect objects are distinguished from direct objects by a voiced/voiceless distinction.

It is thought that there are two branches of the Wu family of dialects, northern (Jiangsu), and southern (Zhejiang), with the southern dialects often being more conservative, tonally. Much of modern Mandarin vocabulary is actually derived from northern Wu; while some modern Japanese words loaned into Mandarin also became absorbed into northern Wu. Hence today, the vocabulary used between northern Wu and Mandarin are quite similar.

The Japanese Go-on pronounciation of Chinese characters (obtained from the Wu Kingdom during the Three Kingdoms period) is from the same region of China where Wu is spoken today.