Lei Zhang discusses Yeeyan, the largest social translation community on the Internet that he co-founded. The Yeeyan community translates more than 150 articles on daily basis, ranges from news stories, opinions, to scientific papers, from various languages into Chinese.
What is the kind of content of the Internet in China? According to Wikipedia, more than 80% of web contents are in English (German follows in 4.5% and Japanese 3.1%). LZ highly doubts the accuracy of these numbers, but still remarks that it points out the dominance of certain languages in the Internet world. To answer this question, LZ ran queries in search engines and examines the languages of the query results. ”Breast cancer” in English results in 38 million returns, but only 6 million in Chinese. So there is a huge amount of content that needs to be translated into Chinese, but machine translations are inadequate to solve this language barrier problem.
Yeeyan is a community translation approach to this problem; it is essentially a “Wikipedia for translation,” with over 40,000 translations, 8,000 translators, and 80,000 members. LZ saw a problem of understanding divide, e.g. issues in 2008 on Tibet and nationalism, or conservatism in economic policy (which, in China, in fact means supporting anti-free market). Translation is not a full solution, but a necessary first step in bridging the understanding divide.
The Guardian Chinese Edition is another Yeeyan project powered by community translation.