Vietnamese, Thai & Indonesian Translation for Southeast Asia Trade

More Chinese companies are moving sourcing, manufacturing and sales into Southeast Asia, and more Southeast Asian buyers are coming to China for fairs and factory visits. That makes Vietnamese, Thai and Indonesian genuine business languages. Here's where they're used and the specific trap each one sets.

Main uses

• Trade and supply chain: sourcing and OEM contracts, supplier documents, QC and factory-audit paperwork
• Product and compliance: manuals, label and packaging content (exact labelling and compliance requirements follow the destination country's rules)
• E-commerce and marketing: product pages, customer-service scripts, localized content
• Interpreting: Southeast Asian buyers visiting China — you can filter for Vietnamese, Thai and Indonesian in our Canton Fair interpreter directory

Each language sets a different trap

• Vietnamese: the diacritics (dấu) aren't decoration — ma / má / mà / mã / mạ are entirely different words. Lose them to a broken encoding, or strip them from someone's name, and at best the text is unreadable; at worst the name no longer matches their documents.
• Thai: words aren't separated by spaces, so wrong word-breaking changes the meaning of a whole sentence. Thai also has levels of politeness and formal register — using the wrong one in business or official documents reads as rude.
• Indonesian: the friendliest writing system of the three, but formal business and government language differs noticeably from everyday usage; don't write official documents in a conversational register.

Check the layout too

Thai stacks vowel and tone marks above and below the line, so tight line-height clips them; Vietnamese accented characters have the same issue. For manuals, packaging and websites, always proof inside the real layout (see Website & Software Localization).

Tell us the language direction, document type and purpose, and we'll quote for what you need.