Translators' cooperative revolution

Chen Chunge (R), a.k.a. "Gu Da Bai Hua," poses with Zhao Jiamin, cofounder and CEO of Yeeyan.com, 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/ 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.