Herland, published in print, translated by Yeeyan's Project Gutenberg. Photo provided to China Daily

War of words for Chinese translators

Poetic profits revive in China

After the translation is completed, Yeeyan usually gets senior translators in their online community to evaluate quality, and once the criteria are met, Yeeyan publishes the book on the in-house distribution channel BytePress. Yeeyan also uses major online e-commerce sites, such as Amazon and China's Douban, to do the same.

Founded in 2007, Yeeyan.org claims to have China's largest online community of translators. The company says there are more than 500,000 registered users, with around 60,000 active translators.

Yeeyan shares 40 percent of the royalties from published e-books with the online translators. Any user can pitch a translation project on Yeeyan's open translation platform and recruit translators with similar interests to work together.

The idea of getting together people with a shared passion for translation came to Zhao in 2006, when he and two other friends were trying to start a company in Silicon Valley.

Zhao has a master's degree in computer science and a doctoral degree in optimization from University of Southern California. He and his friends wanted to start an Internet company and read up on the business models of online companies, but didn't find one suitable for them.