Crowdsourcing boosts translation works
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E-mail Xinhua, September 17, 2014
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| The Voyage of the Beagle, published in print, translated by Yeeyan's Project Gutenberg. [Photo/China Daily] |
An ambitious digital venture is underway at the office of Internet company Yeeyan.org in Sihui East, Beijing's eastern suburb. Yeeyan's Project Gutenberg, which has been ongoing since 2012, is credited with the online translation of Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle. Yeeyan published the Chinese version in August in cooperation with the China Youth Publishing House.
Taking after the original Project Gutenberg, which was initiated by late American author Michael Stern Hart in 1971, to make e-books freely available to people, Yeeyan's project focuses on giving Chinese online readers the option of getting foreign books for free.
Yeeyan has already translated and published around 200 e-books from different languages, with 300 more titles to go. More than 20 books have also been published in print, and many are scheduled to hit bookstores in the coming months.
"This is done by 3,000 translators in our online community," says Zhao Jia-min, 41, the founder of Yeeyan. "We have only two full-time editors in the office to coordinate the schedule of the translation of each book."
Crowdsourced translation, where multiple translators work on the same book, is easily the secret behind the project's success. On average, there are about four translators for each book, with one being the coordinator and supervisor.
After the translation is completed, Yeeyan usually gets senior translators in their online community to evaluate quality, and once the criteria are met, Yeeyan publishes the book on the in-house distribution channel BytePress. Yeeyan also uses major online e-commerce sites, such as Amazon and China's Douban, to do the same. Founded in 2007, Yeeyan.org claims to have China's largest online community of translators. The company says there are more than 500,000 registered users, with around 60,000 active translators.
Yeeyan shares 40 percent of the royalties from published e-books with the online translators. Any user can pitch a translation project on Yeeyan's open translation platform and recruit translators with similar interests to work together.
The idea of getting together people with a shared passion for translation came to Zhao in 2006, when he and two other friends were trying to start a company in Silicon Valley.
Zhao has a master's degree in computer science and a doctoral degree in optimization from University of Southern California. He and his friends wanted to start an Internet company and read up on the business models of online companies, but didn't find one suitable for them.
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