Chinese Online Literature Steps Into Overseas Market With AI Translation

During the third conference of online literature in Beijing from Aug. 9 to 11, the AI translation system of funstory.ai took the breaths of foreign readers away with its capabilities of monitoring, capturing, translating and publishing copyrighted Chinese novels.

Chinese online literature has had trouble being under the spotlight overseas due to the lack of translators and translation inefficiency as the main obstacles in this industry. This March, LinkSure Literature and WiFi Master Key joined forces to launch an open platform named funstory.ai to help online literature make their way to overseas markets. Wang Xiaoshu, CEO of LinkSure Literature told CCTV reporter: “With the help of artificial intelligence, the speed of translating online novels from Chinese into English has skyrocketed by 100 folds, while bringing costs down by 1%.”

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According to data provided by LinkSure Literature, the platform could increase the industrial efficiency by 3,600 times and reduce the cost to 1%. But what did Wang Xiaoshu mean by “translation speed has increased by 100 times?”

According to Wang, the 3600 times refer to the elevation of efficiency without taking into consideration the manual review processes. For instance, if one thousand words normally required 1 hour of manual labor to translate, AI translation could do it in just 1 second. At this speed, according to the evaluation of the BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) algorithm, the translation quality of the funstory.ai translation system has surpassed Google in this vertical, reaching a score of 75 to 80 points out of a hundred.

“However 75 to 80 points is far from enough,” Wang Xiaoshu explained. “We introduced the proofreading process by human translators. We need human processing to ensure accuracy and artistic quality of those literary and cultural works, especially with the profound Chinese language.”

According to the 2018 China Online Literature Development Report, in 2018, the number of domestic online literary creators has reached 17.55 million, and the total number of online literary works has reached 24.42 million. A total of 11,168 Chinese online literary works has spread overseas. An increasing number of quality online literature with traditional culture genres continue to excel at overseas markets, enhancing the influence of China’s soft power.