Hong Kong · 6 min read
When an English-only site is enough in Hong Kong, when you need Traditional Chinese, where Simplified Chinese fits, and how to build each version properly.
By Chris ·
Hong Kong is the one market in the region where many businesses can genuinely choose: English works for a large professional and international audience, and Chinese reaches everyone else. The wrong choice is not usually “English” or “Chinese”. It is building a second language badly.
When English alone is enough
If your clients are international companies, expats, regional headquarters or professionals who do business in English, an excellent English site is the whole job. Many law, accounting, consulting and relocation firms in Hong Kong work entirely in English with their clients. A half-maintained Chinese version would do them more harm than none.
When you need Traditional Chinese
If you want local Hong Kong customers, especially consumers and smaller local businesses, you need Traditional Chinese. It is the standard written form in Hong Kong, and local searches are made in it. Spoken Cantonese is usually written as standard Chinese in Traditional characters for formal content, with colloquial written Cantonese used more in marketing and social media. Your translator should know which register suits your brand.
Where Simplified Chinese fits
Simplified Chinese is for mainland Chinese readers: visitors, investors and clients from the mainland. It is a separate version, not an automatic conversion of the Traditional pages, because vocabulary and phrasing differ as well as the characters. Build it only if you have a real mainland audience; otherwise it is a third site to maintain.
How to build each version properly
- Separate URLs for each language, for example
/en/and/zh-hk/, never text swapped by JavaScript at one address. - hreflang annotations linking each page to its equivalents (for example
en-HKandzh-HK), and a self-referencing canonical on each version. - No automatic redirects by location or browser language. Let people choose, and remember the choice.
- Chinese typography done properly: fonts served efficiently (a full Chinese font can be several megabytes), comfortable line height, full-width punctuation, no fake italics.
- Translated everything: titles, descriptions, form labels, confirmations and structured data, not just the body copy.
Our longer guide covers the details: how to structure a bilingual English and Traditional Chinese website.
Keep both versions alive
The most common failure is not a bad translation, it is a stale one: the English team page changes and the Chinese one does not. Decide who owns each language before launch, link each page to its translation in your editing system, and make it obvious when one falls behind.
A quick way to decide
- List your best clients from the last year. What language do they work in?
- List the clients you want next. Same question.
- If the answer to the second differs from the first, that is your second language.
- Budget for keeping it current, not just for translating it once.
More on building for Hong Kong and on local-market websites, or talk it through with us.
