Internet-based Collaborative Translation Project Management

As a globalized world is settling in, today, the application of the Internettechnology has widely spread, the mobile Internet technology is highly developed andthe mobile intelligent terminals become popularized, more and more people acquireknowledge and get instant information from the Internet and share their exclusivenews with others, the Information Technology has brought a great revolution tohuman beings. The integrative development of the Internet breaks through thegeographical barriers of communication; however, the language barrier is stillobstructing the common communication between different countries and differentnationalities. In a long run, as one of the most pluralistic countries in the world, Chinais unprecedentedly linked together by a new bond----the Internet. China’s Internetusers are explosively growing, which has a profound impact on many areas such asthe country’s politics, economy, culture and technology. In recent years, a new trendof translation based on the Internet that combining the rediscovery of public domainbooks, collaborative translation and electronic publishing has become known by thepublics. One of the best representatives is a Chinese website “Yeeyan.org”, whichaims to build an open community translation platform, to “discover, translate, andread the Internet essence besides Chinese”. In Yeeyan’s translation community,translators are entitled to translate what they thought valuable from other languagesinto Chinese, and then posted these translated resources to the website. Therefore, theparticipation of translation molds Yeeyan into an influential content provider and atranslator’s community. This type of website is a great evangel for many languagelearners, linguists and language-technology combined disseminators; meanwhile, italso creates an opportunity for collaborative translation mode developed from thetraditional pattern into the network pattern.This report provides experience by the author who was entrusted by BeijingDongxi Times Digital Technology Co., Ltd. in2012to conduct an English-Chinese book collaborative translation management based on the Internet; the book, TwentyYears at Hull-House, is belonging to Yeeyan’s electronic publishing project,“YeeyanGutenberg Project”. By playing a role of translation project manager and gettinginvolved in practice of translation of a book, this paper illustrates a completecollaborative translation management process based on the Internet, and discusses themode of digital book publishing translations represented by Yeeyan and the influenceof this mode of translation may have. By clarifying the relationship among the client,project manager and the translators and studying the collaborative translation modebased on the Internet, the report is to find out the advantages and disadvantages of thistype of translation mode, then sums some useful translation management experiencein translation project management practice for the collaborative translation projectimplementation based on the Internet, and sets an example for the present MTIgraduate professional education.