Your Excellency Chairman Li, dear guests,
It is my great honor to join you today to celebrate the 4th Peace Garden Peace Festival.
The world’s peace and stability would not be possible without the concerted efforts of the United Nations, peace organizations and people from across the globe.
As China’s first state-owned translation company, we have a long work relationship with the United Nations.
China Translation Corporation (formerly known as China Translation and Publishing Corporation) was established in 1973 to provide the document translation service for the United Nations, and has been the only UN-designated language service provider in China since then. We are also a language service provider for UNESCO (The UNESCO Courier), IMF and the United Nations Environment Programme. Our United Nations Translator & Interpreter Training Program (UNTIT) has trained over 1,000 translators and interpreters for UN organizations.
At home we are the proud provider of translation and interpretation services for international sports events and conferences including the 29th Summer Olympic Games Beijing 2008, Expo 2010 Shanghai China, the Shenzhen Universiade, the Guangzhou Asian Games, the Nanjing Youth Olympic Games, Qingdao Expo 2015 and the upcoming Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games Beijing 2022. We have helped set industry standards such as National Standards on Translation/Interpretation Service, Translation Service Specifications, Quality Requirements for Translation Service, and Interpretation Service Specifications, witnessing the development of language services in China in the past four decades.
In 2013, we established Global Tone Communication Technology Co., Ltd. (GTCOM), marking the shift of focus from language services to language technology, artificial intelligence and cross-language big data. We have developed and released YeeCloud, a global technical platform for language services, and YeeSight, a platform enabling cross-language big data analysis and processing.
YeeSight combines language technology with big data technology, contains open texts from around the world, visualizes multilingual information and forms analysis models from different perspectives. It has more than 100 data sources and collects 30 million pieces of news and 500 million social media posts per day.
Now let’s try “peaceful development” and use the data from 2012 to 2017 to see how the world, China and the United States were doing in that period in terms of peaceful development and their relationship with each other, from aspects of military strength, culture, sports, infrastructure, international cooperation, international exchange and international aid.
The overall distribution of data shows that China and the United States were major contributors to the world’s peaceful development and peaceful development was a prominent theme of the world. As to the trend, the world showed a sound momentum of peaceful development and the United States and China played a big role in it.
Peak value 1 (China, the USA) appeared in June 2013 when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the United States and the two countries agreed to develop new-type power relations. Peak value 2 appeared in September 2016 when the G20 Summit was held. Peak value 3 (China, the world) appeared during the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.
Based on China Translation Corporation’s accumulation and innovation in the past four decades, GTCOM has become an industry leader in terms of manpower, resources, service capacity and technological strength, making rapid and steady progress. We have always been committed to promoting the development of the language service industry in China.
We initiated the Language Big Data Alliance (LBDA) in April 2016, with 167 members at home and abroad, including universities, research institutes and businesses. They share corpus resources and work together to develop machine translation labs and big data labs.
We have undertaken the CNKEYWORDS program to sort out, explain and translate the Chinese lexical system into multiple languages. We have launched the Phase I project online, including 5,000 entries, 200 million sample passages and sentences in nine languages. Phase II and III will include 20,000 entries and 500 sample passages and sentences in 17 languages.
We have been actively leveraging our strengths to serve the Belt and Road Initiative and have produced the Publishing Industry Report of the Belt and Road Countries and the “B&R” Language Service Market: Overall Analysis, Industry Insights and Policy Suggestions (2017).
The Publishing Industry Report of the Belt and Road Countries looks at national conditions and the publishing industry in Belt and Road countries and China’s neighbors, including their history, culture and tradition, the current situation of their publishing industry, major publishing houses, prestigious writers and their representative works, the marketing mode, etc. It provides valuable references for copyright export, investment and cultural promotion for publishers around the world.
The “B&R” Language Service Market: Overall Analysis, Industry Insights and Policy Suggestions (2017) gives readers a general picture of the language service industry in Belt and Road countries for the training of language service professionals, the development of language products and services and the distribution of language teaching and service resources.
Barrier-free communication is one of the prerequisites of connectivity between Belt and Road countries. Under the Belt and Road Initiative, countries concerned will work side by side to seek progress in infrastructure, economic growth, investment and cultural development, which will bring unseen challenges for language service suppliers.
Language services pave the way for the Belt and Road Initiative. With our resources and strengths in language services and technology, GTCOM will serve the Belt and Road Initiative in all areas, truly benefit participating countries, spread the message of peaceful development and build up people-to-people bonds around the world.
The development of language services in the past four decades would not be possible without stability or peace in China and in the rest of the world. We will continue to leverage our influence in the industry to usher in another four decades of glorious development.
