China struggling to get past its translation bottleneck

China is scurrying to get a sufficient number of translators for the Olympics and, beyond that, the Shanghai World Expo in 2010.

The shortage is no surprise. According to professionals in the field, for years the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the country's top political advisory body, has been calling for more awareness of the translation industry, but China was too busy opening up in other areas.

The shortage of translators, particularly for Chinese to English, was one of the major concerns of a two-day conference held last weekend in Beijing, co-hosted by the Translators Association of China and the China International Publishing Group (CIPG).

Lin Wusun, a former director of the CIPG and an elder statesman in the field, said that while the number of translators has grown dramatically, the quality varies. There are currently 60,000 certified translators, most of whom work for government departments.

Many highly trained translators go by the title of "editor" or technical titles and so are not counted among the officially certified 60,000.

Beyond this threshold of quality lies the rough-and-tumble market of some 500,000 practitioners, whose fees can be as low as 20 yuan ($2.60) for translating 1,000 Chinese characters into English. Unfortunately, you usually get what you pay for.

So as China races to nail down market standards throughout its industries, translators are calling for professional standards.

Lin and others in the field are calling for a comprehensive survey of translators to determine numbers, specialties, geographic distribution and age. The survey would include translation companies and the number of qualified employees along with overseas Chinese in the translation business. They are also calling on the statistics bureau to include translation as a formal industry in the census to get an accurate count.

They want the Ministry of Personnel to establish a qualifying exam for translators similar to those for lawyers and accountants.

As part of professionalization and quality control, industry leaders also want a multilevel certification system put in place. Translation companies would then be required to indicate the numbers and levels of certificate holders they employed.

Certainly the lofty heights of diplomatic translation - evident at the Six-Party Talks and in the company of President Hu Jintao on his African visit - cannot easily be attained by assembly line production of translators.

Ambassador Shi Yanhua, a foreign language expert with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and executive vice-chairman of the Translators' Association of China, gives examples of translation crises in the early days of the New China. In her words, or, more precisely, in the words of her simultaneous translator from Chinese to English, the early leaders' Mandarin "was not so good". In negotiations with Sri Lanka, it was unclear to the Chinese whether the contract under discussion was for bananas or rubber.

With the emphasis on economic development, the country has yet to give literary cultural exchange the attention it deserves.

According to Wu Wei, director of China Book International Promotion and Planning Office, book contracts signed with foreign publishers in 2004 have yet to appear in print, simply because translators are yet to be found.

Sponsored by the State Council Information Office and the General Administration of Press and Publication, with technical support from Google, chinabookinternational.cn - China's first bilingual book website - was launched last month.

Taking a proactive stance, the website lists recommended translators and offers some underwriting of translations. In 2004, China Book International started taking books to the Frankfurt Book Fair.

But problems remain. Wu Wei said that China's classics have yet to be sensitively translated.

Help for China could be available from the unlikely source of Norway.

Speaking at the translators' meeting, Bente Christensen, vice-president of the International Federation of Translators, said that Norway, with a population of just 4.5 million, has a highly successful translation program that could well be adapted by China.

The Norwegian government underwrites translations of both fiction and non-fiction, with translators receiving 25 percent of the royalties.

The government-funded Norwegian Literature Abroad, Fiction and Non-fiction (NORLA) has published more than 1,500 books by Norwegian authors since 1978. Foreign publishers can apply for translation subsidies.

As China seeks to spread its culture, not just its manufactured goods, to the world, Christensen said that the English-language hegemony impoverishes the world's culture. In the United Kingdom, only 3 percent of all publications are translated from other languages and in the US it's just 2.8 percent. Christensen invited China to join Norway in making translation a cultural priority.

She said: "We have a lot of literature we want to share with you, and you have a lot of literature you want to share with us."

Source: China Daily