How Does The Postal System Work With Foreign Languages?

I live in rural China and was wondering how post offices work when it comes to foreign addresses.

Whenever I write a letter to Canada, the address is in English. I have a student (I am a teacher over here) write the word "Canada" in Chinese so the post office will know where it is going. Is this required? If someone from China, who writes a letter to a friend in Canada, and writes his mailing address in Chinese characters, will it be delivered in Canada? If so, how do post offices deal with this situation? Do they have a place where there are people versed in reading all of these different languages can sort the mail(that seems unrealistic).

I hope this question makes sense. Where I live, nobody speaks or reads English so how does the mail sent to me from Canada reach me? How do they know what the address says (I use the english equivalent of the street address) over here at the rural post office?

Hi TomSwift

I would think that letters in a countries PO system that are in a foreign language would be sorted to a special PO employee that can translate the foreign language into the normal language so the PO person concerned can correctly deliver the mail.




The process above to me attracted to much attention to the mailed item and makes me very uncomfortable mailing to China that the mailed item could go missing. Sadly this is the only reason I will not mail to China.

In cases like this, it would best to write the address in Chinese and English. You can write one address on top of the other on the envelope. I've done this with letters to China and it seems to work well. I would not count on any translation or least an accurate one.

I always write the country where the letter is going in Chinese. When I get mail other countries, there is always something written in Chinese on the letter, probably the name of the school where I work. There are no foreigners in my town and nobody speaks English so I can understand how the post office finds me here. I just wonder if someone here wrote a letter to a friend of theirs in Canada (for example) and wrote the address completely in Chinese. Is there someone in Canada that would rewrite the address in English so it could be delivered?

I think you underestimate the efficiency of the Chinese postal system for outbound mail.
I am certain (though I cannot prove it, of course) that all foreign mail passes through a manual sorting channel dividing it by country of destination of the mail. My opinion bases on the idea that the PRC certainly is secretly censoring parts of the foreign mail.

If you want to send a package out of China, it must not be sealed. The Post Office will inspect the contents first before they allow it to be mailed. They have tape available at the Post Office to seal your package after they have finished looking in it. If you get a package from overseas, it usually will have a corner torn off it, so they can peek into it. Of course, incompetence runs high over here so if the package is securely sealed, they sometimes don't bother. Too much effort.

The worst thing is that they are starting to enforce a rule that states that nothing over the value of 1000 RMB, or about USD $160, is to be imported or exported through the Post Office. You can't even pay a duty on it. A fellow teacher ordered three pairs of running shoes from a specialty store in the US (he is about 2 m tall with size 16 feet) and they would not release them. He said the shoes were sitting right in front of him and they would not even accept a bribe, which is unusual. He had to pay to ship them back to the States, where the company agreed to submit a fictional custom form for their value and resend them. They went though the same Post Office and he finally got them.