Hunanese (Xiang) is a Chinese language spoken by around 38 million people in Hunan province in south-central China, including Mao Zedong's home region. It's a distinct branch of Chinese, not mutually intelligible with Mandarin in spoken form. The US Hunanese-speaking community is small, absorbed into the broader Mandarin-speaking Chinese-American population. Our Hunanese translation work is rare — civil documents are in written Mandarin Chinese, with Hunanese being the spoken language used in interpreting work.