Life
Translators allow students to watch US university lectures
By Wang Wei and Eric Jou (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-20 07:48
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Liang Liang isn't used to being called a "genius", although he and his team members translated more than 10 open courses of US Ivy League universities into Chinese and received a great number of compliments from netizens for it.
English versions of open courses videos from Yale, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can now be viewed by Chinese netizens without any language barriers, thanks to Chinese subtitles translated by a nonprofit organization, YYest.
A group of translation-savvy academics in philosophy, psychology and finance established YYest six years ago. Some of them are from overseas, said Liang, team leader of the group.
Liang said they started out translating popular US movies and soap operas such as Friends. They've had a hand in almost every US movie and television series with subtitles on Chinese video-sharing websites.
When they learned famous US universities had open courses posted on-line, they decided to give it a try, according to Liang.
So far, they have translated more than 10 open courses from top US universities. Internet users download the subtitled courses more than 10,000 times a day.
The translated courses include "justice" from Harvard University, and "death" and "financial markets" from Yale University.
"We do it for fun and to better our English," he said.
"We are so flattered that people think so highly of us."
Viewers of their work say they believe the Chinese subtitles enable them to access knowledge from some of the top universities in the world.
Jiang Yunlong, a junior from the University of International Business and Economics, said he wouldn't be able to enjoy the open courses if there weren't any Chinese subtitles.
"I may never go to a class in Harvard, but I appreciate that I have a little taste of how studying there feels," he said.
Liang said translating university courses is much harder than movies or television series and it involves a lot of teamwork.
Liang's colleagues form groups of four to work on each class. Each member does 15 minutes. It takes roughly three days to finish the first draft because they often involve many academic terms and abstract theories.
When the first version is done, they modify sentence structures and vocabulary, and then proofread. The final procedure is to post the work on the Internet.
"Language in some courses involves old English or ancient poems which often give us a hard time," he said.
"But they are academic classes, so we want to make sure accuracy and to minimize mistakes."
It may take half a day to sort out how to translate a word, he said.
He gave an example of the word "physicalism" mentioned during the philosophy class "death" by a professor from Yale.
"It doesn't make much sense in the content if you directly translate it into Chinese," said Liang.
So he e-mailed the professor asking for an explanation and consulted some students of philosophy and finally chose an appropriate Chinese word.
The team has enlarged to 160 members and will continue to expand if necessary.
