YeeYan Translates Blogs Posts Into Chinese
Recently I was contacted by the
publishers of YeeYan, a website that translates
articles from english language blogs into Chinese. They asked for my permission to
translate some of Read/WriteWeb's best posts into Chinese, so that people in China can
read and comment on them. One of the founders, known as "thunder", told me their goal is "to
discover valuable contents in foreign languages and to provide high quality Chinese
translations for them." I was happy to give my permission, because I really want R/WW
posts to be read all over the world - I especially like that Chinese people can comment
on R/WW posts in their own language, thanks to YeeYan. Note that YeeYan always links back
to the original article and they don't monetize the translation in any way.
I know that Read/WriteWeb is quite popular in China, Korea and Japan (where CNET Japan syndicates R/WW). So YeeYan is another way for english blogs to really become 'worldwide' - and I hope it goes both ways too. I've long wanted a way to keep up with my friends in Asia, e.g. Danny Kim's Korean Web 2.0 blog, but so far there's been few solutions. Over time, I hope more translation communities spring up to solve this language problem on the Web.
YeeYan is also localized to english, so that bloggers can see which of their posts have been translated. For example, here is the page for Read/WriteWeb posts.
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Google also provides a Chinese translation in Google Translate. Just to let you know.
Is there anyone translating Read/WriteWeb to Malay/Indonesia language? It is a huge market too.
In fact, Yeeyan now translation Chinese blog post into English as well.
It good to see this kinda thing happening. I really hope to see more of this kinda osmosis through the "great wall" (as it were) that separates the Chinese and English internet.
It benefits everyone.
The term "Chinese" you refer here is simplified Chinese (in writing). People who learned to read simplified Chinese characters only are limited to comprehend content published in traditional Chiense characters.
There are many readers from various regions in Asia read traditional Chinese characters only (or both).
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language
Hi infonote, I am not sure if you could read Chinese. Google translation won't work if you want more than a vague idea of what an article in foreign language is about. I believe in foreseeable future, it will be hard for machine translation to replace human translators, at least for the languages that I am familiar with. However Google Translate is a very valuable tool to make our translator’s life easier.
Jean Yao, interestingly, Google Translate can help a great deal in your case - check out their simplified Chinese to traditional Chinese conversion. Since this kind of conversion is done character by character (almost), with the following url, you can read Yeeyan in traditional Chinese accurately.
http://tinyurl.com/2djq2a
And finally I would like to thank Richard for writing those nice words about Yeeyan. Thank you for your help to spread the idea of bringing down language barriers to your readers. And thank you and other R/WW authors for producing those valuable originals. We will keep the translation going.
Hi Thunder,
I tried Google's translation before and the result was more than tradgic. I am impressed with the quality of your translation (simplified as well as traditional). I am from Taiwan, my major was Chinese Literature. I have done documentation management and localization for European clients. I have first hand experience in dealing with machine translation. It does not have the capacity to handle translation work fully.
I can say that I am critical in the quality of Chinese writings. Yeeyan has done a very decent translation. Bravo!!
I'm wondering if it's necessary to translate the posts written by Chinese IT Bloggers into English.
Because most of their articles are translated from other English blogs.To be honest,only a few Chinese Bloggers have the ability to write high quality originals,and even that does not mean their English versions are right for English readers.
BTW,have you ever commented on en.yeeyan.com or cwrblog.net or other Chinese-English blogs?
I can not find where it translated from English into Chinese. Give direct link to the page. Please.
Tobelle Bless