Addressing Mail To China, Countries With Different Alphabet

Hello all

I was just looking at the expired postcards I have sent via Postcrossing. Their forum has a discussion regarding the China post office not being able to read addresses that are in English.

My question is this: can I put the person's address in English AND Chinese, on the same card? Or will this cause a problem? It is often hard enough to get one address on a card...

This question also relates to countries that use a different aplhabet than English...

(If a moderator feels this topic should be posted somewhere in the Worldwide section, feel free to move it)

I think it would be OK to put the address in two languages. I have seen old covers with the address written in another language by a postal employee when it got to the country or area it was going to. I think it would help, not hinder.

The trick is to make it all neat and readable and fit. Can you perhaps print labels in smaller print size? I know I am not too good at writing in small fonts.


One problem I have noticed is to write the address in the way the destination country wants it written. Example, put the post code where they expect to see itm not where you are used to putting it. Hard to do sometimes I know.

I guess the best you can do is make sure all the indormation is there are written clearly.

Typed in a font such as Courier is even better as that lets a person who is just so-so at interpreting do it easier than with hand writing or such.

Perhaps countries use machines to decipher writing now but maybe not in all of China?

I see Google Translate will translate into different forms of Chines but you need to have your computer set up to show and perhaps print Chinese also.

If you have the address in, for example, Chinese, simply print it off and attach it to the envelope, and write the country of destination in English. There's then no need to write Chinese addresses in alphabetic script. (And BTW, I seriously doubt that the Chinese Post Office has trouble reading correctly addressed letters written in the Pinyin alphabetic script. It's widely used in China.)

This is an age-old problem, though. The British in India faced it all the time in the Indian Post Office, with the multitude of scripts in use, and some fairly wayward addresses on covers. The British solved the problem by having at least one clerk in all the larger offices who could read the scripts, and write the destination in English on the front. This cover





is a good example. It was posted unstamped (encouraging the post office to deliver it, to recover the postage) and addressed to 'Maharajnagar', as you can see written on the front. The problem with that was that Maharajnagar was an old-fashioned, local name for the town otherwise known as 'Charkhari'. Someone else has finally worked out the mystery, and written it in on the cover as well - after it had travelled over a good part of Central India, looking for a home.

When I get an address that is particularly "complex", I do print it out on label paper. Some of those are really tough to hand print!

So if I use all of the Chinese text, but put CHINA in English at the bottom, it will get through the US part of the postal stream ok?

That sounds good to me too. No one needs to know the address details until it gets to the destination country.