The Chinese research community is well versed in the machine translation field, with Baidu a prominent player, and thus implementation of AI in translation workflows is the logical response.
Additionally, as industry professionals begin to broaden their view to think about regional intricacies they should keep in mind that fans are traditionally one of the most powerful forces in promoting specific cultural products.
Entire communities of fan-subbers in each country, with their own rules and code of conduct, maintain control of the artistic process and its results and break away from subtitling norms, pushing the boundaries of traditional audiovisual translation by innovative techniques such as blogging on-screen, creative placement of subtitles, contextual explanations, atypical font styles, just to mention a few, which could be a fresh way to more successfully address the culture barrier issue.
One of the highlights of my trip to China was the visit to the 24th Shanghai TV Festival TV market. The volume and variety of content coming out of China is dazzling and, while there is an obvious need for improvement in translation quality to better address foreign audiences, the otherwise high-quality artistic characteristics of the content and the interesting narratives explored will ensure Chinese content gains worldwide popularity.
At the end of my first trip to China, I brought back the feeling of moving fast forward as I climbed the Oriental Pearl Radio & Television Tower and stood on the glass-bottom walkway at 263 meters above ground. Shanghai is a city whizzing into the future and definitely one to go back to if one wants to understand not only China's potential, but also its future role in the world.
The author is a senior director, research and international development
