China, Turkey build multilingual cross-border e-commerce platform

BEIJING -- China signed an agreement with Turkey on Wednesday at the 4th China (Beijing) International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) to jointly build a cross-border e-commerce platform.

Businesses from the two sides will invest 500 million yuan ($76 million) in the platform to develop an online trading system and build offline business bases.

A system in which people can use Chinese, English, Turkish and Uygur in trading has been developed. These are major languages along the proposed Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

Chat translation software is embedded and the software supports real-time translation of 28 languages.

Luan Lixin, chairman of Xinjiang Erdaoqiao Cultural Tourism Group Co., Ltd., said that physical stores covering 38,000 square meters in the international bazaar in Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region, will provide commodity information to the platform.

The platform will be advertised in about 100 cities along the "Belt and Road."