Arabic interpreters in Guangzhou: the Canton Fair sells escort interpreting itself at CNY 1,000 a day, and we have seven

Checked on 21 September 2026. We are an interpreting company in Guangzhou (Guangzhou GuanRi Translation Service Co., Ltd.). We are not the Canton Fair organiser, not a law firm, and not an inspection body. The escort interpreting this article describes is a service we sell ourselves, so read the first two sections as what they are: a seller telling you that the fair runs a cheaper desk for part of the same job. Nothing here is legal advice or compliance advice. Where a number comes from our own files rather than from an official document, the sentence says so.

The 140th China Import and Export Fair is scheduled to open on 15 October 2026. If you are an Arabic-speaking buyer, the useful thing to know first is not our phone number. It is that the fair itself sells Arabic interpreting, that its published rate is CNY 1,000 per day for an escort interpreter in a language other than English, and that its off-season booking line opens on 30 September — nine days from the date on this article. That page carries no date of its own, which is a caveat §2 comes back to.

Below that fact sit the things the fair's desk does not cover, and the reason we are writing at all: our Guangzhou interpreter directory holds 812 profiles and seven of them speak Arabic.

1. Which rows apply to you

Every row of this table is answered in the section it points to. The first two rows are the ones that cost us money, and they are first on purpose.

2. The fair sells Arabic interpreting itself

The Canton Fair's website carries a page called 广交会翻译服务 / Canton Fair Interpretation Service. It is not a news item and it carries no publication or revision date, which is a real caveat: we retrieved it on 21 September 2026 and quote what it said that day. Its Chinese and English versions both list ten languages, and Arabic is one of them: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Arabic, Korean, German.

The scope sentence is one sentence in Chinese and one in English, and it is the sentence that matters most:

We provide interpretation service inside the Canton Fair Complex during opening hours of the Fair.

The corresponding Chinese line reads 服务范围:采购商服务中心仅提供广交会开馆期间在展馆内的口译服务。 It names the Buyer Service Centre as the provider and carries 仅, "only"; the English sentence has no equivalent of either. In effect both say the same thing: inside the complex, during opening hours.

The rates are published. The Chinese is one sentence. The English is set on two lines, and we have joined them here with a space — the wording is unchanged, the line break was the original's:

English：CNY 600/day/ for booth interpreter (English), CNY 800/day/ for exhibition escort interpreter ; Other languages: CNY 800/day/ for booth interpreter (other languages), CNY 1000/day/ for exhibition escort interpreter (other languages).

Arabic is an "other language". A note follows, in both versions, that under four hours is charged as half a day and over four hours as a full day. Payment is on the spot, in renminbi, at the Buyer Service Centres in Areas A, B, C and D.

Booking has two doors. Outside the fair's opening days you book by phone or email — the page gives 30 September to 14 October for the autumn session, telephone (020) 8913-8055, email ISC@cantonfair.org.cn. During the fair, 15 October to 4 November, you book through one of seven counters the page lists across Areas A, B, C and D; each carries its own telephone number and email address, three of them two numbers, so you can call rather than walk. Note that those dates span the two changeover breaks, 20 to 22 and 28 to 30 October, when no phase is running.

The closing line is where the two language versions stop matching. The Chinese is one sentence; the English is two:

Reminder: Please note that the number of the interpreters is limited; first come, first served.We recommend making your reservation as early as possible!

The Chinese ends at 先到先得。 — "first come, first served." The recommendation to book as early as possible appears only in English. We are pointing this out because it runs in our commercial favour to have the more urgent sentence be the one you read, and you should know that the Chinese page is the calmer of the two. The run-on between the two English sentences is in the original.

We looked for an Arabic version of this page and did not find one. The site's content API returns the English twin of a page when EN is appended to its identifier; that worked here. We then appended AR, ar, FR, ES, RU and PT to the identifiers of this page, the accompanying-personnel notice and the booth-application notice — eighteen requests, every one answered and every one empty. As a check on the convention rather than on the page, 104 of the 1,200 most recent items in the fair's content stream carry an EN identifier and none carries any other language suffix. So, for these pages: Chinese and English only, as far as we can retrieve. The fair's printed attendance guide is a different matter, and §6 comes back to it.

3. Where that line stops

The scope sentence quoted above does two things at once. It tells you the fair offers to put an Arabic interpreter next to you in the halls — offers, not guarantees; the page says numbers are limited — and it tells you that this is the whole of it.

It does not cover a factory visit. It does not cover a meeting in your hotel, a supplier dinner, a trip to Foshan or Shenzhen or the Yiwu market, a visit to a forwarder's warehouse, or the morning after the fair closes. It does not cover the days before the fair opens. If your trip has any of that in it — and most sourcing trips do — then the fair's desk solves one part of your week and you are booking the rest privately, from us or from somebody else.

The two things are not alternatives, and treating them as alternatives is how people end up paying for a full day of private interpreting to sit in a hall where CNY 1,000 might have covered it. Split the week first, then buy each half from whoever is right for it. Whoever you book privately needs four things from you: your dates, which halls, whether any of it happens outside the complex, and what you are buying.

There is one reason not to split, and it is worth pricing rather than assuming: continuity. If you want the person who heard the booth negotiation to be in the room at the factory, that is one private booking across the whole week, plus CNY 300 a day and CNY 50 if you also badge them into the halls, against CNY 1,000 a day for the in-hall part and a separate private booking for the rest. We will give you both numbers for your actual itinerary; we are not going to pretend the answer is the same for everyone.

If your whole trip is inside the complex, the honest answer is that you may not need us at all — with four exceptions worth checking first: the fair says its interpreter numbers are limited and works first come first served; the complex is closed on 20 to 22 and 28 to 30 October; a buyer working two booths at once needs two people; and a narrow technical category may need vocabulary you want to brief someone on in advance.

4. How many Arabic interpreters we actually have

Our Guangzhou interpreter directory holds 812 profiles. Every one of them records Guangzhou as the city. Counting the languages each profile lists:

Seven. Not a team, not a department — seven people, 0.86% of the directory. One of the seven also lists English. One of the seven lists simultaneous interpreting among their settings, against 111 of 812 across the whole directory. Their declared industries, as they filed them, are general trade 6, building and home 2, medical and health 1, textiles and apparel 1; a profile can carry more than one.

Our own FAQ page says, under a question about rare languages, that Arabic is one of our areas of expertise, and that our pricing for rare-language pairs "reflects translator scarcity ... but capacity is reliable". That answer sits in the languages section of the FAQ, and the number inside it is a written-translation rate quoted per thousand characters. On the interpreting side the number is seven, four of whom carry no completed engagement in our records, and reliable capacity is not what that looks like. We would rather you hear it from us than count it yourself, and the sentence on the FAQ page should be narrowed.

Two more things about those seven, because they matter in §5. First, of the 812 profiles in this directory, not one records CATTI or NAETI — neither string occurs anywhere in the file, all 5.54 million characters of it. What the profiles record is a degree level, an institution and a major. Second, exactly two profiles in the whole directory have an empty credentials list, and one of those two is one of our seven Arabic interpreters — and that profile carries our top status label anyway, which tells you what that label is worth: it is ours, and it is not a credential check. Third, every one of the seven cards, that one included, carries the same standing line saying the person is available during the Canton Fair for booth reception, buyer negotiations and factory visits. That line is boilerplate we generate, not a live diary. Availability on any given date has to be asked for.

We do not publish a per-person day rate. All 812 profiles are marked quote-only; not one carries a published day or half-day rate. The only interpreting price we publish anywhere is the line in our FAQ that consecutive and escort interpreting starts from CNY 200 per hour or CNY 800 per full day, "depending on language pair and subject" — and Arabic does not run at that starting rate. The fair publishes a fixed CNY 1,000. We quote per job. You are entitled to hold that difference against us.

5. If you want your own interpreter inside the halls

Start with the sentence that decides whether this section applies to you at all. The 139th-session notice opens by saying who the badge is for: Chinese assistants or interpreters of overseas buyers, holders of a People's Republic of China resident identity card. If you are flying in with your own Arabic interpreter from home, the accompanying-personnel badge does not exist for that person — not as an interpreter, not as an assistant. For anyone you hire here, ask whether they hold a PRC resident identity card before you plan around it; we will confirm it for anyone we propose.

Hiring an interpreter and getting that interpreter through the gate are two separate problems, and the second is governed by rules we could not read in their current form: as of today we have not been able to retrieve a notice for the 140th session.

We checked rather than assumed. We pulled the 1,200 most recent items from the fair's content stream, which after dropping two pinned rows runs continuously from 3 November 2025 to 20 September 2026 — 179 dates on which something was published, the other days being days the site published nothing. No 140th-session accompanying-personnel notice appears in it. As a positive control, the same pull returns the 139th-session notice of 2 April 2026 and the follow-up of 9 April, so the search would have found one had it existed. Last time the application itself opened on 3 April for a fair that opened on 15 April — twelve days. We are not going to predict a date for this session; the fair has not given one.

So the only text anyone can read today is last session's. Here is the rule that decides whether your interpreter is badged as an "interpreter" rather than an "assistant". It is one sentence in Chinese and two in English; the English is quoted:

Accompanying personnel are divided into“assistants”and“interpreters.”Interpreters are additionally required to submit proof of translation qualifications (China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters (CATTI), National Accreditation Examinations for Translators and Interpreters (NAETI), or a graduation certificate in a foreign language major from a higher education institution in the Chinese mainland).

Note what it says and does not say. It says the proof must be submitted; it does not say what the reviewers do with it. And the third option carries three conditions, not one: a graduation certificate, in a foreign language major, from a higher education institution in the Chinese mainland.

Now our seven, as our own files record them. Five record a mainland school together with an Arabic or interpreting major. One records a bachelor's degree from a university in Libya — a stronger Arabic credential in ordinary terms, and the one whose school is not in the Chinese mainland at all, which is what the clause names. One records nothing at all.

We are not going to round those five up into a pass. The rule says higher education institution, and what our field holds is a school name: among the five, two are named as a specialist language school and a seminary rather than a college or university, and one is a branch campus. Whether any of them is a 高等院校 for the fair's purposes is a judgement its reviewers make, on documents we have not seen, and we are not making it for them. Whether any of the seven also holds CATTI or NAETI we cannot tell you either: our directory has no field for it, and as §4 says, neither string appears in the file.

There is a defect on our side here that you should know about before you rely on our pages. The Chinese profile card shows degree, institution and major. The English and Arabic cards do not always keep it: 656 of the 812 Chinese cards name a school, 422 of those names survive the move into English and Arabic, and 234 do not. Six of our seven have a school recorded in Chinese, and all six are in the 234 — not one English or Arabic card among them carries a school name, because the localiser has no rendering for schools like 开远阿拉伯语专业学校 or 宁夏大学同心阿拉伯语分校. So the Arabic page an Arabic-speaking buyer actually reads omits precisely the fact this rule turns on. The Chinese edition of the same card does carry it, if you read Chinese or can have it read; otherwise ask us and we will send the institution, along with whatever we hold on the certificate itself.

The rest of the notice, because several clauses catch people out. The buyer files the application, from the buyer's own account in the fair's Buyer Service System — not the interpreter, and not an agency on your behalf. New buyers have to complete pre-registration and obtain their own Overseas Buyer Badge before they can apply for a companion at all. The English says applications should be submitted at least 2 days in advance; the Chinese says 2 自然日, calendar days, and the notice's own worked example settles it either way: attending on 15 April meant filing no later than 13 April. CNY 300 per day plus a CNY 50 administrative fee, non-refundable once the badge has been scanned by the entry gates — and that is the badge alone, on top of whatever the interpreter costs. The quota clause is two sentences; the first sets a maximum of two accompanying personnel per buyer per phase, one assistant and one interpreter, so a second interpreter can only come in as an assistant, and attending two phases means two applications with two deadlines and two sets of fees. The second sentence is the one to check against your own passport:

Buyers from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan as well as those holding a Chinese passport are not eligible to apply for an interpreter badge and can only apply for an assistant badge.

If that is you, the interpreter badge is closed whoever the interpreter is, and the fair's own in-hall service in §2 becomes the straightforward route.

Two clauses the notice puts near the end and we nearly skipped. If a companion's badge record from previous sessions shows irregularities, an alert is triggered and they have to submit extra supporting documents for review — so a person who has worked the fair before is not automatically the safer choice. And anyone who has obtained an exhibitor or exhibitor-representative badge for the same phase, or a move-in/move-out badge for the session, or who applied for an exhibitor badge and was rejected, cannot hold a companion badge. An interpreter who is also staffing somebody's booth is in that category.

Finally, the clause that is about us as much as about you. The notice requires buyer and companion to have a genuine accompanying relationship, and provides that both parties' badges may be confiscated, both may be told to leave, and both may go on the fair's badge blacklist where they do not. It does not define the term, and we are not going to invent a definition: we do not know where the fair draws the line between a companion and a commercially engaged interpreter, and we are the company selling you the second thing. If that distinction matters to your risk, put the question to the fair before you file — its customer service centre is on 4000-888-999 inside China, (0086) 20-28888999 from outside, and info@cantonfair.org.cn — and get the answer in writing. We wrote the badge mechanics out at length in our badge-rules article; every figure in this section is from the 139th session's notice and may change when the 140th one appears.

6. The date that matters is your phase, not the opening

"The Canton Fair opens on 15 October" is true and, for a lot of Arabic-speaking buyers, useless. The fair runs in three phases and the exhibition sections are split between them. Attachment 1 to the fair's booth-application notice for the 140th session, published 5 May 2026, puts each section in a phase. The attendance guide gives the dates, and gives them in Arabic as well as English: Phase 1, 15–19 October; Phase 2, 23–27 October; Phase 3, 31 October – 4 November.

Our exhibitor directory is built from the 139th-session full exhibitor list dated 16 April 2026, 26,270 companies. Its product categories are not free text; they are filled from a controlled list. Our copy of that list holds 8,450 distinct values, 70,947 assignments, carried by 11,633 of the companies — though 8,450 is our own damaged count of the source's 8,613, for reasons §7 goes into. Eight names on the source's list carry an Arabic, Persian or Muslim word. Here is every one of them, beside what our directory kept:

The fourth column is ours, not the fair's. There is no phase field in this data and no section field either; we read each category name against the section list in Attachment 1 and picked the section it belongs in. Seven of the eight rows survive us being wrong about the detail, which is why we are willing to print the phase at all: a carpet category could be argued into Home Textiles instead of Carpets and Tapestries, and a cap into Men and Women's Clothing instead of Fashion Accessories and Fittings, and every one of those alternatives is also Phase 3. The eighth does not survive it. 阿拉伯PVC毯 is a PVC rug, and read as floor covering rather than as a rug it would sit with Building and Decorative Materials, which is Phase 2. We print Phase 3 for it because both companies carrying it in our directory otherwise sell blankets — but that row is the soft one, and you should not plan a trip on it alone. The fifth column describes where a category sits, not where a company will be standing: a company books into the section it sells into.

The two count columns disagree on four rows — 中东/伊斯兰教服装, 阿曼帽, 阿拉伯PVC毯 and 阿拉伯女袍 — and §7 explains why. Two of those four are not values in our directory at all, which is why their first column reads zero: search our /suppliers/ pages for either name and you will find nothing.

Do not over-read the table. It says where these particular category names live, not what Arabic-speaking buyers buy. Take a wider set — every exhibitor whose name, keywords or products carry 阿拉伯, 中东, 穆斯林, 清真, 伊斯兰 or halal, which is 52 companies out of 26,270, 0.198% — and the phases spread out at once. That term list leaves out 波斯 and 阿曼, so it is not a superset of the eight: four companies carrying one of those categories fall outside the 52. Inside the 52, truck and passenger-car wheels belong with 汽车配件 Vehicle Spare Parts, Phase 1. Arabic coffee pots and household ceramics belong with 餐厨用具 Kitchenware and Tableware and 日用陶瓷 General Ceramics, Phase 2. Hookah charcoal was filed under the category 其他家居用品, which sits in the 家居用品 Household Items section, Phase 2. Christmas decorations belong with 节日用品 Festival Products, Phase 2. Two of those four readings rest on a company name and a keyword line rather than a filed category — the wheels company and the Christmas company both left the product field empty — so they are our inference twice over. Plenty of Arabic-speaking buyers come for machinery in Phase 1 and nothing in our data contradicts that.

One warning about our own pages, because it could cost you a week. Our interpreter page labels Phase 2 as building, home, chemicals and materials — and it does so in Chinese, English and Arabic alike, so this is not an Arabic-page problem, it is ours. Attachment 1 puts 新材料及化工产品, new materials and chemical products, in Phase 1; so does the official Arabic edition of the attendance guide, which prints المواد الجديدة والمنتجات الكيميائية under المرحلة الأولى. If you are coming for chemicals, follow the official document and not our page. We have flagged it internally; at the time of writing it is still wrong on the mobile site, in all three languages.

7. Where our own directory is broken

The two count columns in §6 disagree on four rows, and the reason is us, not the fair.

The source is a spreadsheet of 26,272 data rows — our directory holds 26,270 records because two company names appear twice in the spreadsheet and the build merges them. Of those rows, 11,634 fill the 主营产品 column, at a mean of 6.48 categories each. Counted without treating the forward slash as a separator, the source uses 8,613 distinct category names; our directory ends up with 8,450, and the difference is a bug. Our build script splits that column on a character class that includes the slash. Ninety-four distinct category names in the source contain one — 879 assignments in total — and every one of them comes apart. 涤纶/棉面料, which reads as a polyester-cotton blend fabric, becomes 涤纶 plus 棉面料 — polyester, and cotton fabric — which is two things, neither of which the company wrote. Four of the ninety-four carry more than one slash and come out in three or five pieces rather than two. And 中东/伊斯兰教服装, filed by six companies, becomes 中东 and 伊斯兰教服装: search our directory for the category name that is actually in the source and you get nothing, which is why it is a row in §1.

The same script keeps at most 30 categories per company. That cap truncates 260 of the 11,634 rows. Among the Arabic-named categories it costs four entries outright: one company's 阿曼帽, two companies' 阿拉伯女袍, and one company's 阿拉伯PVC毯 — all four in rows that hit the cap at exactly 30. 阿拉伯女袍, Arabic women's robes, appears as a category in two source rows and survives as a category in neither. The string itself is not gone from our site: one other company has it in its keyword line, and four more carry 阿拉伯袍 or 阿拉伯大袍 there. A keyword is not a category, and only the category feeds the phase reading in §6.

Counted by instance rather than by row: 28 source rows carry one of these eight category names, 31 instances in all, of which 21 came through exactly, 6 came through cut in half, and 4 were dropped. So every count in §6 is a lower bound, and we would rather label it than round it up. Both defects are on our fix list. Neither is the fair's doing.

8. Where those 52 suppliers are

Of the 52 exhibitors in the wider set, 11 are in Guangdong. That is 21.15% against 18.31% for the directory as a whole — both figures ours, counted from our own copy of the exhibitor list — so this set is not unusually far from Guangzhou, and we are not going to pretend it is. But 41 of the 52 are outside the province, and they cluster: Hebei 9, Zhejiang 7, Henan 5, Shandong 4, Jiangsu 3. Seven of the nine in Hebei are in Hengshui or Shijiazhuang, and seven of the nine sell clothing — one sells headscarf fabric and one sells prayer rugs. The carpet, rug and blanket makers are spread across Hebei, Henan, Tianjin, Shandong, Zhejiang and Hainan. Guangdong's eleven break down as four in footwear (Foshan, Guangzhou, Jieyang, Shantou), three in food and confectionery (two in Chaozhou, one in Maoming), two in clothing (Dongguan, Shantou), one in ceramic tableware (Shenzhen) and one making coffee pots (Jiangmen).

Twenty-four of the 52 are filed as 外贸企业, trading companies, 23 as 生产企业, manufacturers, 4 as 工贸企业, and one is blank. That matters for a factory visit: a trading company's registered address is an office, and the plant you actually want to see may be somewhere else entirely. Ask for a door-to-door address in writing, ask how long the visit itself takes including the parts that are not the tour, and have the address checked on a Chinese mapping service — the international ones are thin on Chinese street addresses, so this is a thing to ask whoever is interpreting for you to do, not a thing to do from your phone at home. Both the distance and the duration are the supplier's numbers, not ours.

All seven of our Arabic interpreters are registered in Guangzhou. For a visit in Hebei or Zhejiang we would be sending someone from Guangzhou — we have no local Arabic interpreter to send. The fair's in-hall service does not travel at all. If a local Arabic interpreter matters more to you than continuity, hiring one in the supplier's own city is a perfectly sound decision and we will not talk you out of it.

9. Is there still time

Here is the scale we publish ourselves, from our FAQ page, two sentences:

For rare language pairs or large conferences, book 4-8 weeks ahead. Common pairs (Chinese↔English/Japanese/Korean) can usually be scheduled 1-2 weeks ahead.

Arabic is a rare pair by that standard and by our own headcount. Measured from 21 September 2026: 24 days to Phase 1, 32 to Phase 2, 40 to Phase 3, 44 to the close. Four weeks before Phase 1 was 17 September, four days ago; four weeks before Phase 3 is 3 October, twelve days away. That is the whole of the urgency, and it is arithmetic on a number we published before we needed it to be persuasive.

Our Arabic FAQ page carries a third sentence that the Chinese and English versions do not: that rush bookings inside one week carry a 30–50% surcharge and depend on availability. We are not going to quietly benefit from the inconsistency. The surcharge is real and we have asked for the other two pages to say so; in the meantime, if you are quoted a rush surcharge you never saw on the page you read, say so and ask for it in writing before you accept it. Which page you were shown is a fair thing to raise with us.

If we cannot staff you, you will hear it as a sentence and not as a delay — our published promise is a quote and a timeline within two business hours on a working day, and a refusal travels at the same speed. The fair's own desk in §2 is a real alternative for the in-hall part, and its booking line opens on 30 September. Guangzhou has other agencies, and independent Arabic interpreters advertise for this fair directly. None of that is a concession we are making. It is what the situation is.

10. What to ask us, and what we will answer about ourselves

Ask for the institution and the major behind any interpreter we propose, and for what we hold on the certificate. §5 is the reason: the badge rule turns on it, and the Arabic and English cards for these seven do not show it.

Ask whether the person you are shown is the person who will arrive, how we will tell you if we have to substitute, and whether you may refuse the substitute. Ask what happens if your phase moves or your flight does. We do not publish a generic answer to those in an article, because the honest answer is that they are settled one booking at a time. What we will do is put them in the written confirmation before you pay, without being asked: the named interpreter, how a substitution is notified and your right to refuse one, the cancellation and rescheduling terms, and the quoted rate with any rush surcharge shown separately. If a confirmation reaches you without those, that is our failure and not an oversight you have to catch.

Now the same standard turned on us. Our Chinese FAQ says the company is in Guangzhou. Our English FAQ says we started in Guangzhou and maintain branch offices across China. Our Arabic FAQ goes further and names seven: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Chengdu, Nanning and Changsha. Three pages, three claims. And the same FAQ, in all three languages, says our standard staffing for conference interpreting is two interpreters per booth per session per language, with Arabic named among the languages — while one of our seven Arabic profiles lists simultaneous interpreting at all. If you are shopping for Arabic simultaneous interpreting, that sentence is writing a cheque this directory cannot cash, and you should treat it as a question to put to us rather than a capability to rely on. On the question you are actually buying — who can stand next to you and interpret Arabic — the directory has one answer: 812 profiles, all registered in Guangzhou, seven of them Arabic.

Two more defects on our Arabic page, found while writing this. The industry filter is still in English while the rest of the page is in Arabic. And one of the seven cards renders the major as the Latin word "Arabic" inside an otherwise Arabic sentence. Both are ours and both are on the list.

If that is enough to work with: our interpreter directory filters by language and industry, and the Arabic filter returns the seven — with the Phase 2 labelling error from §6 still on the page, so read the phases off the official document rather than off ours. WhatsApp and WeChat are on the same number, +86 139 2416 6640 — wa.me/8613924166640 — and if that number is awkward from where you are, the contact page has the rest. Tell us the phase, the halls, and whether any of it happens outside the complex; that last answer decides whether you need us for the whole week or for two days of it.

11. Sources, and the date on each

• Canton Fair Interpretation Service, the fair's own page, Chinese and English. Languages, rates, scope, booking windows and counters in §2 are from it. It carries no publication or revision date — that is the caveat that sits under the lede's countdown as well — and we retrieved it on 21 September 2026.
• Notice on Badge Application for Personnel Accompanying Overseas Buyers for the 139th Canton Fair, published 2 April 2026, official Chinese and official English, with the follow-up notice of 9 April 2026 for the application-opening dates. Everything in §5. We could not retrieve a 140th-session notice when we checked on 21 September 2026.
• Notice on booth applications for the 140th session export exhibition, published 5 May 2026, and its Attachment 1, which lists sections by phase. Source for the section names and phases in §6.
• 2026 Attendance Guide for Overseas Buyers of the Canton Fair, ten language editions, listed on a page dated 2 March 2026 in Chinese and 30 July 2026 in English. The phase dates in §6 are from page 2. The Arabic edition carries the same table with official Arabic section names, which is where §6's Arabic chemicals correction comes from. Worth knowing too that the complex map inside it is labelled only in Chinese and English.
• Our own FAQ page, retrieved 21 September 2026, for the booking-lead-time, staffing and rate lines in §4, §9 and §10.
• Our own interpreter directory, 812 profiles, and our exhibitor directory built from the 139th-session full exhibitor list dated 16 April 2026, 26,270 companies. Both read on 21 September 2026. All counts in §4, §6, §7 and §8 are ours, computed from those two files.
• The badge mechanics in full, including the parts §5 only summarises: our article on the accompanying-personnel badge rules, and, for how a booking is put together, our earlier guide to hiring an interpreter for this fair.

Official English is quoted verbatim where it exists. Comparisons between the Chinese and English texts were made on decoded, whitespace-normalised text rather than byte for byte: the fair's HTML pads its English with entity spaces — 549 of them in the accompanying-personnel notice alone — so "the same sentence" here means the same after normalisation. Where no official English exists, the article says so rather than dressing our own rendering up as the fair's.