Bilingual Copywriter (English / 繁體中文)

About the role

Most agencies in this city write in English, hand the file to a translation vendor, and hope. The Chinese line comes back grammatically correct and completely dead. We stopped doing that three years ago and it is now one of the reasons clients hire us.

You will join a copy team of four, sitting inside the creative studio rather than in a separate translation function. You get briefed at the same time as the art directors, you go to the same crits, and your Chinese work is presented as original creative — because that is what it is.

Work spans campaign lines, scripts, packaging, retail signage and a fair amount of long-form: brand books, founder letters, the occasional 3,000-word feature for a client's owned channel. About half of the output ships in both languages.

What you'll do

• Write campaign headlines, body copy and scripts in English and 繁體中文, treating each language as a first draft rather than a mirror.
• Adapt regional English copy for the Hong Kong market — knowing when to localise, when to transcreate, and when to tell the client the line simply will not survive the journey.
• Partner with an art director from the first brief so language and image are built together.
• Proofread and quality-check Chinese artwork before release: punctuation, line breaks, traditional-character correctness, and the specific horrors of vertical setting.
• Develop and maintain tone-of-voice guidelines in both languages for three retained clients.
• Present and rationalise your lines to clients, in whichever language the room is speaking.

What we're looking for

• 2+ years writing professionally in a bilingual environment — agency, publisher, in-house brand team or newsroom.
• Genuinely native-standard 繁體中文 with natural Hong Kong usage; you know the difference between written Chinese, spoken Cantonese on the page, and a Mainland-flavoured line that will read as foreign here.
• Native-standard English writing — clean, rhythmic, and free of the stiffness that creeps into second-language marketing copy.
• A portfolio with at least three pieces where you wrote both language versions yourself.
• Bachelor's degree in any discipline; Chinese, Translation, Journalism or Communications is a natural fit but not required.

Nice to have

• Mandarin copy for Greater Bay Area briefs, including comfortable switching to Simplified when a client's mainland channel needs it.
• Experience with SEO or long-form owned content, not only campaign lines.
• Some sub-editing or proofreading discipline from a publishing background.

What you get

• 13th month salary plus discretionary bonus
• Hybrid — three days in the Sheung Wan studio, two wherever you write best
• 16 days annual leave rising with service
• Medical and dental cover, plus HK$3,000 a year of optical
• Books, courses and a monthly writers' lunch on the studio