I’ve been playing with Yeeyan for a bit recently and I’ve come to realize that it could be a great free marketing tool for English businesses that have newsworthy articles. Yeeyan is a Chinese-language community website with members that translate articles from English to Chinese. All members do this for free. If you’re a business or website owner that doesn’t know Chinese, you may still be able to take advantage of this to:
- Have your newsworthy content translated for free.
- Have your content read by hundreds or thousands of Yeeyan readers.
- Gain relevant Chinese-language links back to the original article source, good for SEO if you want to rank for Chinese terms or get indexed by Baidu.
The translation quality varies but it will certainly result in a better translation than any software could do. I haven’t tried this yet myself, but for those that are interested and can’t speak Chinese, here’s how you would submit an article. Note that Google Translate won’t help you because you’ll need to register and log in.
1) Click the Register link.
2) Fill in the fields to register.
3) Go to your email and click the registration link.
4) Click the login link.
5) Click the link to recommend an article.
6) Fill in the following fields. The subjects are listed in the order “Business, Sports, Nature, Science, Society, Life, Art, Health.”
At this point you have a nice link to your page and a chance that somebody will notice it and translate it into Chinese. Save that URL. If you get lucky and somebody translates it for you, you can see a link to the translated version on the bottom of the page. It’ll look like this.
To test this out, I recommended an article about a restaurant in Toronto that promotes sex in its bathrooms because there can be no Chinese newspaper or online news site without some content about foreigners doing crazy things. 😉 By the time I finished this blog post there was apparently already somebody working on translating this article.
This is what it looks like when somebody is translating the article, but it has not yet been finished.
If you use this and it works for you, I’d love to hear about it. 🙂