T&I industry stops Chinese go global?
xinhuanet and a few other Chinese papers ran a story about the Chinese translation and interpreting industry.
The main issue is this:
The translation industry employs around 500,000 people, including retirees, college students and returnees from overseas universities who work as freelancers. But only 60,000 professional translators can produce accurate translations from Chinese into a foreign language, according to Wang Xin, an official with the Training Center of the China International Publishing Group.
China currently has nearly 3,000 registered translation firms with more than 400 in Beijing, according to the Translators Association of China. But many of them are “briefcase companies” with only a telephone, a computer and one or two full-time employees. The part-time translators and interpreters they hire are not always qualified.
Since Lingo started operations in China I was aware that there are not “many” qualified translator into Chinese. This is a huge challenge in terms of translator recruiting and testing. I know that we are very good in doing these things well.
The other issue is extremely interesting: not much we know about the actual impact of translation on globalisation. George Ho, a remarkable Korean translator just finished his PhD Auckland University about this. I think his conclusion is that a new theoretical (value based) approach is needed in translation theory to describe this impact (but then I have not read his thesis…).
So let’s think about this a moment: there are many people translating a lot of content from English into Chinese. From the web stats, however, we know that Chinese languages have been on a steady and dramatically increase in the internet. But it appears that the Chinese drive to global markets would be hindered dramatically by the lack of foreign language skills. How would a Chinese company market their products in Europe?
Interestingly the articles see this as a challenge for the education sector in China and other Chinese language countries. I wonder about that. Is it just a lack of understanding the translation process that is behind this notion? I think translators should be ideally translating into their mother tongue - so what is needed is a drive by other companies to recognise this lack of translations. When I was a child, I heard the theory that tourism brought democracy to Spain. Maybe translation is putting the pressure on China?
It is in any case an interesting issue - even though Mr Wang Xin might have to re-think his argument.
The original articles:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-02/20/content_4204932.htm
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/art/2006/02/21/243380/Desperate_need_for_translators__interpreters.htm