New platform to reshape traditional translation industry
- By He Shan and Liu Qiang
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E-mail China.org.cn, June 3, 2016
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| Gu Jufan, general manager of Beijing Chinese-Foreign Translation & Information Service (CTIS). [Photo / China.org.cn] |
A new translation service platform – inewyee.com — has been launched by Beijing Chinese-Foreign Translation & Information Service (CTIS) to reshape the traditional translation industry.
The new online platform aims to redress the communication imbalance between clients and translators, a bottleneck in the traditional translation industry. The tricky problem is that there are many people scouting for translators who can't seem to find them, while there are many translators looking for more work.
Typically, translators won't trouble themselves with small orders under 200 yuan. But these "small orders" are not small in the market. What inewyee.com does is to pool small orders online to allow more translators access to them.
"The market model is 'One word will do', which means customers can place an order worth only a few yuan," said Gu Jufan, general manager of the CTIS.
"Taken as a whole, the demand is huge. Small orders will be the next blue ocean in the translation market," Gu said.
Inewyee.com claims to have China's biggest reservoir of translators and is able to match the most suitable translators for a project based on its translator performance evaluation. The platform provides a win-win solution to both clients and translators.
However, the imbalance of demand and supply is not the only issue the CTIS wants to tackle.
In the traditional translation industry, an inconvenient truth is that translation has for years been undervalued and translators have been underpaid.
"For nearly 20 years, translators have been paid 80 yuan per 1,000 words for rendering an English book into Chinese. As a result, many translation agencies have started to refuse work."
The result is that readers complain about poor translations of Chinese versions while a good translator is hard to come by due to the low rates.
"The industry is suffering a huge brain drain. Only a very small number of translation majors from hundreds of colleges will choose to become a translator after graduation," Gu admitted.
Translation is not easy. "To stop the brain drain, translators should be fairly paid for their work," he said. "That's what the CTIS is trying to do."
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