About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

I have been following Yeeyan (译言) - a community for people to translate articles in foreign languages (mostly English) into Chinese language volunteerly, since Aug. 2006 when it was called “言多必得”. I personally like the old name which means”you will certainly get something if you express more”. It is form a Chinese idiom “言多必失” means the opposite: you will certain leak some secretes if you keep talking. The current name is more straightforward: “translation” and “language“.

In a presentation by Zhang Lei(张雷), one of Yeeyan’s founders in CnBloggerCon 2007 in Beijing, Zhang Lei compared the online resources about “Breast Cancer” in Chinese (乳腺癌) and English. In the example of Sohu Health Channel, there are less than 30 articles about the general knowledge and treatment. But in a single website of http://www.breastcancer.org/, there are more than 8,000 pages. Statistics show that 1/7 of women will suffer from breast cancer in the world.

• Baidu: 乳腺癌: 8,210,000
• Google: breast cancer :38,800,000

According to Lei, the huge gap of quality contents between Chinese language and English was one of the motivation that Ding Ding (丁丁), Zhao Jiamin(赵嘉敏) and himself found Yeeyan. These three founders from Silicon Valley saw the opportunity in “High Quality Chinese Contents” on the web with the inspiration to encourage Chinese to “discovery, translate and read the best of the Web“.

Yeeyan is a bridge of KNOWLEDGE in Chinese and other languages. I found 140 results about “earthquake” (地震) on Yeeyan 9 days after the earthquake, and more than 100 translators joined a translation group. These articles include the reports by western medias (such as CNN, Newsweek, BBC, etc), knowledge about earthquake forecast, rescue, disease prevention. For example, one translator finished <Epidemics after Natural Disasters> by World Health Organization 4 day after the earthquake. Webtizens have helped to spread the word about these great resources on what to do scientifically after the disaster. (see here, here, here and here)

Zhang Lei even contacted Dr.Barbera Joseph from George Washington University and consulted him about crisis and disaster management. Here is the abstract of his post on Yeeyan blog:

请译言的读者、译者、合作伙伴、媒体广为转载本文！
今天，我与美国乔治华盛顿大学灾难、危机、风险管理学院（ICDRM）主任约瑟夫·巴贝拉博士（Barbera, Joseph）通了电话，听取了他对 四川地震紧急应对状况的看法。巴贝拉博士提出下述几点呼吁：
*第一：目前最关键的问题，是救援的决策者**决定**何时停止**对被掩埋者的搜救工作。* 巴贝拉博士紧急呼吁，*搜救工作至少应坚持到震后14天！*他提供了这样一份研究报告：《地震垮塌房屋受困幸存者时间与存活分析》（译言正在紧急翻译)…

Thank you! Yeeyan and all volunteers who have built a bridge in knowledge in face of such crisis.

I have also Interview Zhang Lei on phone about two weeks’ ago. Here is what I learned from him about the team, product and plan.

Q: Why did you and your other two founders get this idea?

Lei: We are very interested in translation. And when we are able to read some many great and fresh contents online, we want to share them with more people in China.We were the first translators of Yeeyan.

Q: What’s your background?

Lei: I am a Tsinghua 96 alum. After I got my Master Degree on Operation Research (OR) in US I worked for Oracle in Silicon valley. Yeeyan is not my first start-up. We tried to launch fantansy sports product during 2006World Cup. As you know, it is very common that first startup fails. Yeeyan is our second baby.

Q: Could you briefly share with us the milestones Yeeyan has achieved today?

Lei:

Jul 2006: 言多必得 found; it was a platform for volunteer translators to publish articles.

Dec 2006: Yeeyan launched. It is a more open platform with more support for translation. For example, users can copy and paste the original contents into an editor, and can run machine translator before editing. Users can tag the article and join different group,such as business, literature, current issues.

Mar. 2007: Yee Pro Beta launched. It is a wikimedia platform also translators to work together for larger projects.

Q: Why do you want to turn Yeeyan into a wiki? Isn’t wiki difficult to use for most users?

Lei: We believe in the social collaboration(SC), and wiki is a great tool for SC. In the past year, we have learned that translation is addictive. It is also very time consuming. In a wiki platform, we will enable more users to work together for big projects. We want more volunteers to join us, even though they don’t have time to finish a long article, but just editing a paragraph whenever possible. A wiki platform creates the possibility.

Wikipedia is successful. I have written a very detailed guide on how to use wiki on editing. I don’t think the technical aspect is a problem.

Q: What’s the status after you launched Beta?

Lei: There are 4 completed projects (including “Long Tail” which has been completed before) and 14 on going projects. It is pretty amazing.

Q: What are the difficulties you have in the past 18 months?

Lei: In Chinese websphere, except of Baidu Zhidao(百度知道), there are not many communities generating high quality contents. Good news is that we don’t need to translate ourselves now. lol. The community is generating 30+ pieces a day. The one big challenge we are facing is that we don’t know much big the UGC market is in China/Chinese.

Q: I know you have quite some Techcrunch translations. What are the most popular contents ?

Lei: A lot. Yes, technology, entrepreneur, business, these are what we ourselves are interested in. Arts and literatuer, current issues are also very popular. Curently, we have 5000+ articles contributed by 1500+ active translators.

Q: How do you guarantee the quality of the translating works? What about copy right issue？

Lei: We have a feature called “眉批”, a sticky note like feature with which readers can always comment on the translating for correction or improvement or whatever. Readers can also rate the work.

We think a published piece of content online is meant to be distributed and shared, especially blog posts. We encourage translators to inform the authors before publishing. And we will take down the contents if the authors disaprove. So far, we get permission from some prominent bloggers such as Guy Kawasaki, Fred Wilson (A VC)and haven’t received any ”complaints” from the authors.

Q: What about your other team members? Are you full time?
Lei: The other two founders are Ding Ding (丁丁) and Zhao Jiamin (赵嘉敏). At early stage, we three did technology, product and marketing together. Now, Ding Ding is more focusing on product, Jiamin is on contents/editing and I am repsonsible for media and marketing. Jiamin and I are full time for Yeeyan. Jianmin is now in Beijing leading a team.

Q: Are you in need for any financial funding?

Lei: We are talking very closely with a few VCs.

-End

More coverages of Yeeyan from the web and media:

• YeeYan Translates Blogs Posts Into Chinese - ReadWriteWeb
• A window to the world (China Daily)
• web2.0时代背景下的网络翻译与创业 (Chinese)
• Interview of Zhao Jiamin (Life Weekly,三联周刊) (Chinese)

The current projects on Yee Pro.

A Yeeyan fans meet-up in Beijing early this year.

During 2007, I’ve been busy with Kango (now Uptake), a new travel review aggregator that collects reviews

fom across the web and uses semantic analysis to make it all searchable. Our goal is to help people make better travel decisions on where to go, where to stay, and what to do. I’m VP of Marketing and a founding seed investor in the company. We just launched our private beta, and was recently covered in VentureBeat, TechCrunch, GigaOm, WebWare, Jupiter’s Diane Clarkson, Jens Thraenhart, and HotelMarketing (and many others). We also received coverage in the Chinese blogosphere here, and here. This was a surprise as we had not given any thought to the Chinese market at all.

There is an incredible one-way mirror (technically a two-way mirror) effect in the world today. People (ok, educated elites) in China have a high degree of awareness about what is going on in the US. But most people (including educated elites) in the US have a low degree of awareness of China.

Our recent launch of Kango was a great example. Kango is 100% focused on the North American market but nevertheless we received some Chinese blogosphere coverage. On the other hand, I don’t really know what is going on in our space in China outside of Ctrip, Elong, and Qunar.

Min Guo, my CNReviews blog partner based in Shanghai, told me about YeeYan, which crowdsources volunteer translation from English to Chinese. But the flow of translation from Chinese to English is pretty small. Another one-way mirror.

There is a vibrant and diverse community of China blogs in English. Sites like Wangjianshuo, Danwei, Sexy Beijing, EastSouthWestNorth, Sinosplice, GlobalVoicesOnline, China Law Blog, RConversation and CWReview are just a few examples. But for those of us still learning the Chinese language, the visibility into the Chinese blogosphere and society is via a relatively small number of bridges like these.

The one-way mirror was especially clear when discussing popular culture. Last year, I spoke at length at dinner with a marketing director at a company that I was advising. The conversation turned to American TV shows, and she shared that she was an avid follower of Prison Break and Entourage. This was a “zen slap” of sudden realization for me–a typical Chinese professional in Beijing knowing more about US TV shows than an American professional (me) in Silicon Valley. Later, Min shared with me that she and her husband spend the entire National Day holiday in China watching Desperate Housewives! I mean, isn’t this show incredibly culturally specific? Another “zen slap” realization that the world knows America but America knows little about the world.

So Min and I decided to embark on doing some blogging to bring greater awareness in both directions. We’ll just launch into it without having a clear roadmap and see where it takes us! So what are you interested in?

UPDATE:  As I’ve been blogging, I have found that I need an outlet for posts that are just off-topic for CN Reviews.  So I just launched a new blog at ElliottNg.com.   Go there for my other random ramblings!