On the first point, my understanding is there one written form of Chinese. The characters are ideographic (representing ideas of the word) and don’t sound out the words at all. So a Cantonese speaker would have a different spoken word than a Mandarin speaker but they would write the word the same way. (I also believe there is also a simplified vs traditional form of the writing, but that’s again not language specific).
As to the second point, you can find many, many examples on the web of clueless translations where someone obviously put the word into a program and just wrote (or miswrote) whatever came out. So actual understanding wasn’t present.