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