There are plenty of blogs about China, both large and small, but there are only a few that reliably and regularly translate original Chinese content (news or entertainment) directly into English. There’s a certain appeal to reading information as it was originally written, albeit through an imperfect translation, that brings you just that much closer to the Chinese and what they’re thinking.
The Players
From oldest to newest…
EastSouthWestNorth
EastSouthWestNorth is the personal blog of Hong-Kong-based Roland Soong and the oldest — even most influential — blog of this bunch. It is also the simplest, a no-frills affair cobbled together and maintained with arcane late 1990s Microsoft Frontpage 5.0 desktop software. While many of Soong’s translated news articles draw heavily from Hong Kong media sources, Soong has a wonderful habit of occasionally diving head first into the deep end of major incidents, collecting — and contrasting — the reporting from sources around the world. He’s also not afraid to tackle underreported subjects either. As a statistician by training and trade, Soong’s blog also regularly features translated poll and survey results about all manner of topics, a quick way to gauge what people (often Chinese, Hong Kong, or Taiwanese) feel about something or another, provided you’re conscious of how such polls work and the most they can reveal. Unlike most blogs, ESWN does not allow reader comments, which is maddening for readers wishing to discuss the topics he covers but nonetheless a conscious decision by a Soong that doesn’t want to worry about criticism. Updated daily.
Global Voices Online China
Global Voices Online is a massive blog with hundreds of volunteer bloggers publishing reports and translations from multiple countries, in multiple languages, and a self-proclaimed “emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.” It is part of the non-profit organization Stitching Global Voices, founded by Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman. GVO’s China section itself has several different contributors reporting on different issues, providing not just background and summaries but also translations of opinions and perspectives from Chinese bloggers and other Chinese netizens. Updated multiple times per week.
chinaSMACK
chinaSMACK popped onto the scene a little over a year ago, ostensibly created by a young Shanghainese girl named Fauna. Along with a small army of irregular contributors, chinaSMACK translates internet posts and topics that have become popular on China’s major discussion forums like Tianya, Mop, NetEase, Sina, etc. Most of these topics are social or cultural in nature, often shocking, scandalous, or silly and generally always entertaining to behold. One thing that makes chinaSMACK somewhat unique — even popular — is their aversion to strongly political subjects, something most blogs about China revel in. Another thing is a their strong emphasis on including translations of Chinese netizen reactions and comments with their translations of the original posts or news they’re reporting, even more so than GVO above. They even have a special glossary defining common Chinese internet memes, slang, and expressions. The grand scheme? To give non-Chinese readers a glimpse into what many Chinese netizens find interesting, what they’re talking about, and how many of them behave…for better or for worse. Updated daily.
ChinaHush
ChinaHush was started by a Chinese-American guy named Key nearly a year ago and was quickly derided by many as a shameless copy-cat of chinaSMACK in too many ways ranging from its name and design to its content and self-professed mission. However, there’s certainly more than enough interesting content coming out of China’s internet space for there to be more than one chinaSMACK, and ChinaHush aims to establish itself in that niche. Like chinaSMACK, ChinaHush reports on popular Chinese internet stories, minus the consistent inclusion of translated Chinese netizen comments. More impressively, ChinaHush posts ever so slightly more often than chinaSMACK. For us selfish readers of both sites, the best scenario is for each site to cover the material the other one misses. Can ChinaHush get out from under chinaSMACK’s shadow? Only time will tell, and Key’s consistent postings and continued efforts to differentiate from the latter will only help. Updated daily.
China News Wrap
China News Wrap appeared at the start of this year with its early posts being translations of headlines on the front page of major mainland China newspapers (similar to Danwei, which can be accessed behind the GFW here), publications, or news websites. It soon evolved into each post being translations, or sometimes summaries, of the individual Chinese articles themselves. There’s not much information about who runs the website except that it may be a certain Marc Howe in or from Australia. Most of the selected articles are skewed towards international economics and politics though there are some social and human-interest articles as well. Updated multiple times per week.
The Awards
Now that you’re familiar with the main contenders, we’ve got a few random awards to give out, partly to honor (or gently rib) these websites and partly to give you, dear reader, some more interesting information and commentary.
Most Prolific – EastSouthWestNorth
Roland Soong is a veritable one man juggernaut, generally translating more original Chinese content into English than any of the other blogs listed here. In fact, he probably publishes more content overall, and has been doing so longer than all the rest of these blogs combined. Given ESWN’s bare bones design and atypical blogging format, however, it can be a bit difficult keeping tabs on all the content he hemorrhages nearly daily if you’re relying on an RSS subscription. The reason is because much of his content is placed on a rolling homepage that isn’t syndicated to RSS. Fortunately, a CNR reader previously set up a Page2RSS feed that scrapes ESWN’s content and syndicates it via RSS, albeit with a lengthy delay. Still beats visiting the site constantly.
Most Lively Community – chinaSMACK
Of all the websites here, chinaSMACK owns the rest when it comes to reader participation and comments. Not only does their content almost always include translated Chinese netizen comments, each of their posts gets an avalanche of comments from their visitors. On average, a post of their’s will quickly accumulate up to 50-80 comments within the first couple of days while their most controversial posts will easily hit 300-400-500 comments as their readers argue, debate, or troll each other. No one comments at China News Wrap, those who would like to can’t at ESWN, and though they started only a few months after chinaSMACK, ChinaHush only manages a couple comments per post on average. One caveat though, chinaSMACK’s comment section is as lively as it is often demoralizing.
Most Investigative – EastSouthWestNorth
This category because everyone has their own opinion on what deserves further attention and digging. To be clear, none of these websites do any “investigative journalism” in the traditional sense, as they’re not journalists out in the field traveling and interviewing subjects of interest. They’re just bloggers reporting on what they see and can find on the internet, piecing things together into a coherent and hopefully clearer picture for their readers. With perhaps the exception of China News Wrap, all of these blogs have had their moments revisiting a story or posting a follow-up, but prolific ESWN wins this award for the sheer amount of information Soong can collate when he sinks his incisors into something. Just take a look at his coverage on the recent Urumqi riots or the infamous Edisen Chen Sexy Photos Gate.
Best Designed – chinaSMACK
Ah, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and this beholder (with two eyes, not one large one and many smaller ones on tentacle stalks) has to bestow this award upon chinaSMACK, despite the somewhat garish exploitation of hot pink. Of course, that hot pink has also rightfully defined chinaSMACK’s brand (along with 囧) and, while some parts of their website still feature too much of it, the website overall is tastefully balanced with dark and light grays. More importantly, an obvious amount of effort was put into the design so that images and text all have their place in a logical, coherent whole. We’ve even taken cues from them here on CNR. The design isn’t perfect, but its good enough to beat the rest of these sites…though just barely so over the cool pastels and fancy satellite map eye candy of Global Voices Online. Just barely.
Worst Designed – ChinaHush
No offense to Key, but ChinaHush edges out ESWN for this dubious award. Why? Because there’s a difference between trying and failing and not trying at all. ESWN is the latter. Originally, ChinaHush looked like a cheap shanzhai version of chinaSMACK, but with some blunt prodding (by me over e-mail to Key), the design has changed with substantial differentiation, albeit with little overall aesthetic improvement. Some main culprits include: its the harsh color contrasts (you think hot pink is bad, try blocks of black and white ), the distorted or improperly resized images, the clunky featured content slideshow on the sidebar, and the general in-cohesiveness of the overall layout and design. Oh sure, I’m being mean, but I’m also pushing Key to improve it for ChinaHush’s own long-term benefit.
Most Unreliable Website – chinaSMACK
Whether it is due to its own popularity, external hacking attacks by enemies, or some mysterious technical reason, chinaSMACK is too often bogged down or outright inaccessible. YMMV but, these days, not a week goes by without an attempted visit to chinaSMACK resulting in several 500 Internal Server Error or 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable messages being thrown back in my face. This is a big problem and one it needs to take seriously because it hurts everything they’ve accomplished so far. A pretty design is useless when the page won’t load and a lively community isn’t so lively when its members can’t post their comments.
Most Advertising – chinaSMACK
I’m generally not opposed to websites having advertisements, as long as the ads don’t pop-up or take over my screen. After all, they’re offering free information, entertainment, or services and they deserve to get some compensation for their hard work. We have ads on CNR too. That said, ads still take up real estate and can sometimes be distracting. chinaSMACK and ChinaHush have the most advertising spots of this bunch. ChinaHush’s off-center 728×90 Leaderboard ad at the top of its page is pretty annoying (mostly because it stands out), but it is nothing compared to chinaSMACK’s sidebar-topping triangle of doom, especially when all three show the same advertiser (for me, it’s often Ctrip).
Most Scandalous – chinaSMACK
This was a tough call between chinaSMACK, ChinaHush, and ESWN. ChinaHush was quickly ruled out simply because its too much an emulation of chinaSMACK with very similar content but lacking the distinction of being first to the game. That left chinaSMACK and ESWN. Neither website shies away from featuring controversial content including salacious or grotesquely violent images, and while both sites also feature less shocking content, chinaSMACK gets the edge simply because ESWN dilutes its shocking content more with non-shocking news articles and poll numbers. chinaSMACK has, by some measures, toned down over time, particularly with content including nudity, but the scandalousness of its commenter community somewhat compensates for that. Oh, and they even have an online personals service now. ‘Nuff said!
Are we missing any China blogs that emphasize English translation of original Chinese content? Have a good idea for an award? Let us know in the comments below!
ChinaSmack’s translations of Chinese internet users’ comments is interesting at first… but I’ve found that there is so much negativity that it just turns me off now.
I’ve also posted some translated content on my blog but it’s really random as it’s just my personal blog on which I post whatever interests me at the moment. If I have enough time, I’ll choose a focus and start to post more regularly. :)
LoL, I think most comments on the internet are pretty negative. People tend to be very careless online. With regards to chinaSMACK specifically, I think it’s pretty easy to guess which post might contain a lot of negative comments and that’s one way to stay away from them if you’d rather not feel demoralized by them. Then again, sometimes the comments pleasant surprise you.
Let us know when you start posting regularly. And is that ATM photo real? LoL, if so, that’s awesome.
Interesting post, Kai.
Why not include CNREVIEWS? At least you guys can win the Best Designed award in my mind, haha.
Jason, lol, because we don’t translate squat usually! We’re not worthy in this category! As for best designed, I don’t think so. I discovered a long time ago that our design breaks on Macs and some other browsers but I’ve been too lazy to bother figuring out how to fix it. As long as it looks fine on my screen…
Thanks for the flattering gesture nonetheless, but your Arethmia theme is much prettier than CNR! ;)
Some good stuffs on Chinese Tools Blog:
http://www.chinese-tools.com/china
No politics, some scandals…
Big website, but this is for blogs that regularly update and explicitly emphasize translated original Chinese content, not just reporting on stories. Your 3 blogs do not seem to update on a regular basis, and if your bloggers are translating content instead of just reporting it (something of a difference), it’d be more clear if they provided links to their sources. Cheers.
We would be nowhere without Roland. This list is not complete, however, until it adds Joel Martinsen at Danwei, certainly one of the bloggers “that reliably and regularly translate original Chinese content (news or entertainment) directly into English.” Joel has been one of the best and most prolific translators of Chinese articles and stories into English for years, far longer than China Smack. Of course, his pieces tend to lack the sizzle of China Smack, so maybe you should consider another award, such as Most Erudite. :-)
Richard! When are you coming back from America? Joel doesn’t make the list because Danwei isn’t a translation “blog”. This was about blogs, not bloggers and, like many other blogs, Danwei occasionally posts some translations but doesn’t really emphasize it as what they do. Most Erudite would work, or if I’m going to give him a hard time as I have before, Most Esoteric might fit the bill too. ;)
I disagree. Joel posts enough translations to almost count as a blog on his own, plus there’s Alice Xin Liu’s translations and Eric Mu’s summaries. There’s enough translation content to make Danwei count as one of the ” few that reliably and regularly translate original Chinese content…”
You can hand out the awards, but we can deface our ballots with write-ins.
Yes, you are most certainly free to suggest whatever blog you want.
No, I don’t not personally see Danwei as a translation blog. I see it more as a general China news blog that occasionally includes translations. I’m not disrespecting Joel or Alice’s value as translators, I’m judging whether or not Danwei as a blog overall can be characterized as a “translation blog”. I submit that the above websites have far more in relation with each other given their stated purpose and presentation format than Danwei does. Danwei is sufficiently set apart from them in my opinion, just like Shanghaiist or ChinaGeeks or many other blogs that post plenty of translations as well but aren’t defined by it.
Seriously? At the moment, seven out of the ten stories on Danwei’s front page are translated content; I’d argue that Danwei goes even further than mere translation by virtue of the context it gives to the translation posts that make up the overwhelming majority of its content. The “About” page of Danwei.tv gives a further clue as to the role of translation in the site’s purpose: “Danwei.0rg is a website focused on the Chinese media, presenting translations of articles appearing in the mainstream media and on blogs and Internet forums.” (Emphasis mine in case you missed it.)
“Most Erudite” is not a bad idea, but I think “fewest translations of illiterate BBS threads about tits” might better emphasize why Danwei and ESWN are the 老大s of the China translation blog scene.
Brendan,
First, I think you make a very good point with Danwei’s self-description in their About section. I’d like to say that I understand where you guys are coming from. I’m not sure if you guys buy it.
Second, let me try to explain where I’m coming from and why I don’t consider Danwei to be similar enough to these other blogs:
1. I consider Danwei to be more of a news aggregator blog, not unlike Shanghaiist, which is also not on this list.
2. I think the reason for this is because of the ample amount of Danwei Picks posts that come in through my RSS (which is how I read all of these blogs except when I comment).
3. GVO, through Oiwan, is actually like this as well.
4. That’ said, I still personally feel these above websites fit more fully into the niche this post is about than Danwei does.
5. Tangent: I just checked danwei.tv. 3/10 posts with translations on first page. 7/10 posts with translations on second page. 50%. This is a lower ratio than every blog above except GVO, because of Oiwan.
6. Should I add Danwei or remove GVO?
7. I personally think of these above blogs as sources of translated Chinese content. I subscribe and go to them for translations and that is what I am recommending to others. I don’t subscribe or go to Danwei for the same reason and thus am not recommending Danwei for that reason. Of course, that’s just me. This is merely my perception as the guy compiling this list and this post.
Maybe you think I’m dissing Danwei or giving Danwei the short end of the stick, but given how much we’ve openly linked to, referenced, and complimented Danwei in the past, I don’t think you’re being fair to me or us. Again, the self-description in the About page is would suggest otherwise, but I’m going to go with my own experience, impressions, and judgment here. I hope Danwei and you guys won’t take it personally.
I can see where you’re coming from, though to be fair, Danwei Picks is a separate section and separate RSS feed from Danwei’s self-generated content, so I (and, I suspect, many others) tend to think of the link aggregation as separate from Danwei’s main thrust — unlike Shanghaiist, which is epiphytic by design, or GVO, which generally focuses on links and shorter pieces, only occasionally features longer translations, and doesn’t have anything even close to the quality, quantity, or consistency that Danwei does. It’s your site and your list, of course, so it’s up to you — I just think a lot of people were taken aback somewhat by the oversight.
Brendan,
I think Danwei Picks used to be separate but they merged them into the main feed quite awhile ago. I vaguely remember one of them (Joel?) telling me about that in a post where I recommended Danwei (English-language China blogs to watch in 2009? Not sure, forgot).
I agree that GVO’s quality of translations has generally seemed to have dropped. I think it has to do with their individual contributors, some being better than others. I personally have stated a zillion times that I miss Kennedy’s posts when he was contributing to GVO a lot.
I asked the GVO vs. Danwei question because I recognize that the GVO feed has a lot of non-translation only-links posts too. I think what holds me back from swapping them out is my past lingering memories of GVO and that I generally ignore GVO links but I actually pay attention to the Danwei links. Therefore, the Danwei links dilutes the content stream more. Outside of the links, I think GVO produces less but what they produce almost always includes translations, whereas Danwei’s is, say, 50%. It may not be fair to Danwei to ignore GVO’s links but not their’s, so my fall back is that GVO seems to have a tighter focus on translation than a Danwei that has translation posts every day but also a lot of non-translation posts as well.
Thanks for the comment and understanding.
I seriously doubt anyone’s offended. I’m certainly not. Different opinions, that’s all. Re Danwei Picks, that’s just a useful addition like Roland’s Recommended Reading. It’s not not the main content. Anyway, it’s completely up to you what you decide. It’s your blog.
“Most Erudite” is not a bad idea, but I think “fewest translations of illiterate BBS threads about tits” might better emphasize why Danwei and ESWN are the 老大s of the China translation blog scene.
You’re right about Danwei, but Roland makes excellent use of T&A on his blog. He’s absolutely mastered the tabloid format.
I think China Briefing does a good job with admittedly boring stuff like laws and taxes but its useful to know and otherwise usally costs money to otherwise hire somebody!
Kai,
It seems that chinaSMACK makes the list for all the wrong reasons. By your count; three negs and two pos.
By my count, it’s four negs and one pos. Your category ‘Most Lively Community,’ is, in my view, a negative also.
Any commenter on that site who has an I.Q. of 70 is in danger of being ostracized because he’s a genius.
Kudos to you, however, on a great job and a great site.
Hey WD,
My personal feelings toward chinaSMACK has officially developed into a love-hate relationship. I really enjoy what they do, but like you, I generally hate a lot of the commentary that inevitably finds its way on their comments.
That said, a “lively community” in of itself is not a bad thing. We’re just making value judgments about chinaSMACK’s specific community. From a “successful blog” perspective, chinaSMACK’s community can be considered a success, evidencing its ability to attract people and compel them to comment, creating discussions, and ultimately visits and pageviews.
Thanks for compliments and flattery! Cheers!
While the question of quantity vs. quality is always going to rage when it comes to webhits – the question of spammers is something most of us that have been doing this for a while can agree on, it terms of annoyance.
From what I have seen at Fauna’s site of late – it looks like the SPAM trolls have seen the webhit numbers and decided to “set up shop”, as also evidenced of late at other China-centric sites (CD BBS, ChinaHush, etc.).
Definitely, and chinaSMACK’s content generally lends itself to attracting what many of us would consider “low quality” hits/visits/pageviews. That said, I’m sure they get plenty of high quality visits too, since…you know…we visit, right? ;)
As for SPAM, I haven’t read the comments section on chinaSMACK lately so I don’t know. Has it been overrun? We got a rash of Indian spammers spamming “IT solutions” here at CNR recently though.
Spammers are different from trolls, though, unless you encounter the rarer troll spammer, those who insist on repeatedly posting annoying shit just to, well, annoy others.
From what I can see, over at the CD BBS – there is a troll spammer, who likes to hock CW numbers now and was trying to sell knock off sneakers before – usually the same prose and structure on the pitch. As for the other sites – it all depends on the wave of SPAM gangs that are working that particular month (have a feeling that the SPAMMERs have been comparing notes about which websites are still active with webhits and diversity of viewers). That reminds me – saw an article at the Times that folks here should see – SPAMMERs attacking Facebook and other social accounts:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/technology/internet/14virus.html
i came across New Dynasty (the url is http://newdynasty.com.cn), it is a mag (e-mag i guess) in Xian. I haven’t seen that before anywhere here in china and was directed to them by a friend. they cover so much stuff (models,they make own movies..they call it nd tv, news.), it is very interesting. And their design is very state of the art. I haven’t seen that before in china. i like and use it as a great info source for xian (i am gonna move to Xian next month). is that site actually run by expats?