Translators' cooperative revolution
- By Zhang Rui
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E-mail China.org.cn, June 10, 2014
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Zhao Jiamin (L), cofounder and CEO of Yeeyan.com, poses with the popular micro-blogger Chen Chunge, a.k.a. "Gu Da Bai Hua," during a break at the Advanced Seminar on Building China's Language and Translation Abilities, themed "Translation and Communication of Chinese Culturem" in Beijing, May 17, 2014. [Photo by Zhang Rui / China.org.cn] |
Yeeyan is planning to make the platform more accessible to the publishers, but this starts with its core concept of crowdsourcing, which is "something we never changed since Yeeyan was born," Zhao said.
One of the peaks for Yeeyan regarding crowdsourcing was "Steve Jobs" by Walter Issacson, a 500,000-word biography and collaboration with the Citic Publishing House. Yeeyan recruited translators from around the world and, within fewer than 30 days, Citic Publishing House had published the Chinese edition. This automatically set a typical example in China's translation and publishing industries.
"I know translators have different styles," Zhao said. "In the 'Steve Jobs' case, five translators with similar backgrounds and styles were selected from 500 who applied for the project. We also have a process of self-check and cross-proofreading among translators to let them learn from and approach the styles of one another."
"Steve Jobs" set an unprecedented precedent, but the quality of translation were furiously discussed and questioned. Three years later, Zhao uses the sentence he wrote in his blog three years ago just after the project was done to describe the result, "We're not perfect, and the translation isn't perfect. But we want to make all our readers happy."
It was this book project that paved the way for the Gutenberg Project, making this book translation crowdsourcing model a way to produce more book projects by allowing users from the online community to work together.
But Yeeyan has never considered itself a translation company.
"Most Chinese translation companies are using workshop-style management, which cannot control qualities and translators aren't effectively organized so they don't have the ability to negotiate their prices,” Zhao said. “The low-price competitions in the market will see many translators with great capabilities and good potential walk away from the profession. Those are major factors why China's domestic translation industry has a bad environment.”
He continued, "The real technology revolution will bring great innovation to human beings' organizational structure. The reason why we always believe in crowdsourcing and continue to explore and practice it is because we believe the transformation of organizational structure is a real innovation brought by the Internet. The boundaries of enterprises should be broken down while the community and future enterprises should merge together. This is the trend."
The CEO believes Yeeyan has gathered more and more translation lovers and professional translators into one big family, where they can learn from each other and develop further. Their platform has also established and prepared a huge translator pool in China.
Zhao borrowed a sentence from his hero, the former founding executive editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly’s book, "Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization," to describe Yeeyan's inspiration: "Ours may always be a flashy type of creativity, but there is something to be said for a slow, wide creativity of many dim parts working ceaselessly."
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