Recently I was contacted by the publishers of YeeYan, a website that translates articles from english language blogs into Chinese. They asked for my permission to translate some of Read/WriteWeb’s best posts into Chinese, so that people in China can read and comment on them. One of the founders, known as “thunder”, told me their goal is “to discover valuable contents in foreign languages and to provide high quality Chinese translations for them.” I was happy to give my permission, because I really want R/WW posts to be read all over the world – I especially like that Chinese people can comment on R/WW posts in their own language, thanks to YeeYan. Note that YeeYan always links back to the original article and they don’t monetize the translation in any way.
I know that Read/WriteWeb is quite popular in China, Korea and Japan (where CNET Japan syndicates R/WW). So YeeYan is another way for english blogs to really become ‘worldwide’ – and I hope it goes both ways too. I’ve long wanted a way to keep up with my friends in Asia, e.g. Danny Kim’s Korean Web 2.0 blog, but so far there’s been few solutions. Over time, I hope more translation communities spring up to solve this language problem on the Web.
YeeYan is also localized to english, so that bloggers can see which of their posts have been translated. For example, here is the page for Read/WriteWeb posts.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)