China’s Translation Market, Research Paper Example

Acknowledgement

I hereby wish to thank the following persons for their assistance and input towards the completion of this work: Many thanks go to those individuals and organizations that in one way or another made my research a success. Many thanks to go to my supervisor for the invaluable support and consultations he accorded me. My family members can’t go unmentioned for the material and moral support they accorded me during the entire period I was working on this proposal. My fellow college mates and work mates also did recommendable job with the important ideas, advice and information shared across the divide thus making my research easier and of good content, many happy returns to all of you.

I have to acknowledge all the authors, researchers and even practioneers in China’s Translation Market for all their efforts in adding more value to this important practice not only in China but also on the global scene. It is due to their valuable efforts that assisted me to get a foundation of this preliminary research especially in the literature review section. Finally, my sincere thanks go to the whole college fraternity including the library staff who accorded me that environment and access to the books in the library to gain the information regarding my research. God bless all of you abundantly.

Abstract

In the last few years, China’s Translation market has experienced an unprecedented growth both in revenue and customer base. There is huge number of translators who have dedicated their lives to translation as a career. The scope is wide with individuals translating Chinese language into most of the international languages like French, Germany, English, Russia, Portuguese, Spanish and even Mandarin. Translation has also been done even unto small and less known African languages like Swahili and Kiganda. This has mostly been attributed to big population, technological advancements and flexible immigration procedures that China offers. In 2005 alone, this industry recorded a staggering RMB 20 billion in revenue. This clearly shows it is a great industry in the economy that can not be ignored.

This notwithstanding, this flourishing industry has had its own major share of challenges. The first one being poor regulation from the authorities. This has led to mushrooming of bogus training centers that has literally brought down the quality control on its knees. Therefore, to survive in such disturbed waters the players in the industry have resorted to throw quality concerns out of the window and charge abnormally low fees to get clients. Another challenge is that of customers who are not bothered with the quality issue. This is may be because most of them take translation as mere pass time activity and hence issue of paying more to get good quality training is more of a luxury than a necessity.

This is the reason as to why I am writing this preliminary research. I want to critically examine China’s translation market in the past, present and what is the likely future of this mult billion RMB industry. The research begins by exploring the status quo of China’s translation market though in a brief manner. This is then followed closely with an in-depth analysis of the principal problems facing the Chinese translation market. This has been widely explored so as to establish the best way to move forward. In the third section, I attempt to examine some of the possible solutions to the problems or challenges that had been discussed in section two. This is purely on my own research and understanding hence does not in any way intend to intimidate, undermine or further still endorse other people’s findings and research on the same topic. My greatest hope is that the industry regulators in particular and all of us in general will borrow one or two ideas from the final findings of this research that will be of importance to them as far as quality control in the translation industry is concerned.

I close my preliminary research on China’s translation with a short conclusion on what I have learnt from the study undertaken.

A Preliminary Research on China’s Translation Market

Research objectives

The major research objective of this preliminary research is to explore the past, present and future of China’s translation market. Another major objective will be to determine as to what exactly can be done to improve the quality of China’s translation market. This will be the centre piece of this research proposal that all the other areas will be revolving around? Status quo of China’s translation market

Translation is a traditional industry with a long history, which plays an important role in the development of the national economy and opening to the outside world; and in the era of global economic integration, it has become one of the world’s most popular industries. Particularly, as the accession to the WTO of mainland China, the translation market is developing rapidly at an unprecedented rate. At present, the annual output value of the global translation market is more than 13 billion U.S. dollars; however, Asia-Pacific region accounted for 30%. The size of China’s translation market is 11 billion Yuan and it is expected to break through 40 billion Yuan in 2011, and China’s translation market has a huge space for development. With the expansion of the scope of Internet applications and e-commerce market’s maturing, this value will continue to increase.

By 2007, the market size of translating the foreign language on a web page into the native language services will reach $ 1.7 billion. At the same time, enterprises, institutions and personnel engaged in the translation services are also in a rapid increase. According to the information provided by the Translators Association of China, after nearly a decade of development, there are nearly 3,000 translation companies registered in the Mainland China where Beijing has 400. The types and methods of services are growing proliferation, which including human translation, machine translation, software translation and website localization and so on. The echelon building of services personnel are increasingly taken seriously. There is a translation team of nearly 500,000 people, which is composed of the retired national translation ministries, returned overseas, Chinese students and foreign language professionals, active in China’s translation market. (Data Source: the Website of Statistics of State Administration for Industry and Commerce)

Main problems in China’s translation market

As an emerging industry, the importance of the language services has not yet got a wide recognition and attention by relevant parties and society. Specifically mentioned, the main problems for the development of the translation market are shown as follows (Ren, 2003):

Small translation scale without forming an industry

With less than 15 full-time staffs, many Chinese translation companies are in the operating condition of family workshops, whose annual turnover does not exceed 1 million Yuan, which just has a small number of good industry brands. In China, it lacks of professional education and training institutions to train qualified translators. In many Chinese translation projects, only a small amount of translation works choose to outsource. As translation standard recently developed and the implementation process lacking monitoring and measurement, the functions of the Translators Association in guiding the development of the translation industry and providing information are not fully realized. At this stage, in China translation is just a profession rather than industry.

Large in number, low in quality

As the threshold is very low to set up a translation company in China, there are more than 3,000 formally registered translation companies and the types of informally registered translations studio are more. As many translation companies claim that they could undertake a variety of industries, multilingual translation, however, their internal work does not use translation memory tools and terminology management tools with few full-time staff and fewer full-time translators with rich experiences, most relying on part-time translation or subcontracting to others, thus the quality of translation is difficult to control.

Fierce in competition, lower in price

The majority customers of the Chinese translation company are domestic. In order to compete for customers, the competition of many companies is fierce, who often use low-cost translation and other non-standard way. Because of lower prices in translation and in order to get profits, the conventional translation, editing and review process can not be guaranteed, resulting in a decline in the quality of translation. In a fierce price war, many translation companies can not get enough profit, and have to struggle for surviving.

 Lacking an in-depth study and a proven guidance and management between industries

The establishment of an industry needs to have excellent statistics and research reports to support, which is what we are lacking of. In a very long time we just regard the translation as a professional skill, rather than an industry or industry, not to mention the research in this area. In 2004, the Translators Association of China complies with the requirements of the development of the situation, begin to extend translation from the academic sphere to industries, and gradually assume the responsibility of the industry associations. But the language services market is very irregular and has huge differences in terms of geographical distribution, business form or mode of administration. As a non-profit organization and limited in resources, TAC is difficult to completely control the industry as a whole in a short time, and thus it is difficult to guide the whole industry directly and effectively. At present, the industry research has just started and the analysis of type of operation is almost blank, where there are a lot of works to do.

Huge gap of translation talents, severe shortage of teachers

As the absence of the authoritative industry statistics, it is difficult to estimate how many professionals are available and how many professionals are demanded in the language services industry. However, the research about translation industry carried out by TAC this year shows that, 67.7 percent enterprises which are in the companies surveyed plan to increase more than five employees in the next year, and the same proportion of enterprises believe that the most lacking part in the language services industry is personnel training. This confirmed that there is a relatively large gap between the strong demand for translators and the professionals’ supply, especially the lack of quality translation of foreign professionals, and these all become the bottleneck of China’s culture to “going out” and the direct impact on our country’s developing strategy to overseas markets (Jixian, 2007).

Suggestions on promoting the sound development of China’s translation market

Having faced a good opportunity for development, it is the common responsibility of the entire industry to eliminate factors not conducive to the development of the industry, so that the Chinese language services industry will have a healthy and sustainable development. For comprehensive reviews and analysis of all sides, the following suggestions are proposed in this article for the status quo of China’s translation market:

The first is to establish the research system and formulate the development plan of the industry. First of all, companies should have a good knowledge of national policies to win policy support. Secondly, we must study the industry conditions, in order to develop the industry’s long-term development goals. Not a separate language services industry in the national statistics, the researchers would have to find their own data, and do their own research (Jixian, 2009). In the process of writing this paper, the author has communicated with relevant departments and has accessed to the statistics of the whole nation translation professional personnel and the national translated and published statistics; In addition, by querying the data, the author also received a number of key industry data. In the future, the industry should establish information sharing mechanisms with these institutions, as well as more functional departments, regularly collected and published the credibility of the industry statistics. In the future, the industry should gradually establish the mechanism of industry research, regularly study the status and problems of development of the industry, to accumulate data and analyze the development of the industry, planning and guidance on the development of the industry. We hope that more industry institutions and personnel will participate in the active and support the infrastructure of the industry (Jixian, 2009).

The second is to strengthen the construction of regulations, and to establish and improve the system of assessment. Industry access is the governmental behavior; we can promote and influence it, but not to lead it. However, as an industry, we can formulate our own standards about norm, and based on these norms to improve the industry qualification assessment system, then to establish the order of the industry. At present, the Committee of the Translators Association of China translation service and localization services committee follows the establishment of the Standards Working Group to set up relevant standards according to industry development and market demand; it will be a long-term and systematic project .We will also establish the development standards, regulate conduct, and reduce the problems of incompatible and redundant construction in translation skills, translation and teaching (Jixian, 2007). Otherwise, we need to actively explore how to qualify the industry bodies, enterprises and individuals according to standards, enabling them to participate in market competition and maintain a fair and reasonable trade order with an appropriate qualification.

The third is to promote close integration of industry-university cooperation to enhance the training level of personnel. It is the demand of talent that determines the direction of personnel training. The industry agencies, enterprises and other employing units should be actively guided to actively participate in all aspects of personnel training, to make full use of industry resources, and to be in close cooperation for curriculum setting, faculty development, practice base construction and other aspects with translation teaching institutions, thus jointly exploring a mode to develop innovative, practical and inter-disciplinary talent. At the same time, relevant norms must be established, such as qualification requirements for part-time teachers and qualification review for practice base, to ensure that such cooperation is really helpful to train high-quality, professional talent for the needs of the society. Currently, the TAC is working with the Translation Master Degree Committee in Ministry of Education to discuss the development of relevant standards, so that a long-term and stable cooperative relationship between schools and businesses is promoted to be established on the basis of “mutual benefit and win-win benefit”. At the same time, on the basis of further strengthening the target of translation teacher training, the feasibility of the use of distance education and new means to accelerate the speed of translation teacher training shall be explored, in order to better adapt to the needs of the development of translation. In addition, the training and qualification identification of other talents needed in the language service industry shall be carried out on the basis of practical research, to provide a solid guarantee for the development of the industry.

The fourth is to effectively integrate industry resources and build the authority exchange platform. In the era of globalization, resources and information are productivity. It will be helpful to achieve the scale and sustainable development of the language service industry by effectively integrating the resources of the language service industry, thus creating a reciprocity and win-win industry platform where resources and information are shared and breaking geographical boundaries to provide fair chances. Translators Association of China (TAC) is currently exploring this with the departments concerned. In addition, activities such as industry conferences are also important platforms to gather industry information and promote exchange and cooperation. TAC is willing to build more and better exchange platforms for the industry to fight for inviting the colleagues from all aspects of the industry, such as government departments, relevant industry organizations, multinational corporations and international colleagues to these platforms, making it a multi-industry and cross-cutting brand communication activity, thus truly realizing the common development and promotion with stakeholders (Renato & Donald, 2010).

To sum up, the service industry for the language of China is an emerging industry. If the practitioners can unite and work together, then the development environment of this industry will be fair, orderly, healthy and harmonious, which will undoubtedly promote the leap-forward development of the translation industry in China.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to point a few areas that I have noticed in this preliminary research. The first is that indeed China’s translation market is riddled with many challenges that are as a result of our own making whereas others are out of our own control. This should be the starting point of the discussion. You can only address a problem if you realize it and accept it in the first place. Most of these problems are our own making starting with the regulator, the players in the industry and the public at large. Each one has a role to play in order to improve the translation market quality.

I strongly feel that the starting point, should be educating the clients or the public of the reason importance of seeking quality in their quest for language translation. This is the greatest weapon against the vicious cycle in the Chinese translation market. This is simply because if the consumer demands quality and he or she is willing to pay for it, then there is no reason as to why the providers will not also improve the quality of their services.

The second remedy is to streamline and empower the activities of the regulator so as to crack whip on bogus players in the industry that do not conform or meet the minimum quality requirements. Regular and spot checks should also be encouraged to ensure that this is done (Renato & Donald, 2010). The third option is that of addressing the challenges facing the players in the industry and supports them so as to improve the quality of their services. This includes such areas as staffing them with qualified personnel, financial aid to equip them with the necessary materials that are required in their day-to-day operations etc. This is a big challenge because for any business to survive it must at least break even leave alone making a slim profit (Renato & Donald, 2010).

Lastly, there is need also to embrace new technologies in delivering quality language translations in China. Modern methods of training like teleconferencing, on line tutorials, chat rooms among others should be encouraged. This is because of not only the time flexibility they offer, but also affordability. Technology also attracts competent personnel from all over the world thus quality improvement (Renato & Donald, 2010).

Whereas I have tried my best to explore this subject, the buck does not stop there. There is still a lot that future scholars and all of us need to do in order to ensure that the quality of our translation market is not compromised. This is a worthy cause that all of us should strive to do in order to achieve quality services in our lives.

References

Allied Business Intelligence, Inc. (2002). Language Translation, Localization and Globalization: World Market Forecasts, Industry Drivers and eSolutions, USA. China Internet Information Center, “The 18th Statistical Report of the Development of the Internet in China”

Jixian, He (2007). A Journey to Go beyond the Translation Circle, in http://www.tac-online.org.cn/fyhy/txt/2005-06/26/content_79936.htm.

Jixian, He, (2009). A Journey to Go beyond the Translation Circle, in http://www.tac-online.org.cn/fyhy/txt/2005-06/26/content_79936.htm.

Ren, Yi, (2003). The Translation Economy – in the Formation of an Industry, in http://www.qianlong.com/.

Renato Beninatto & Donald A. DePalma, (2010). Ranking of Top 20 Translation Companies, in http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/members/res_cgi.php/050701_QT_top_20.php.

Website of Statistics of State Administration for Industry and Commerce retrieved in March 10, 2012.