New chapter

By Mei Jia | China Daily | Updated: 2017-07-07 09:04

A 200 million yuan ($29.4 million) fund is launched by China Reading Limited to help promote online literature.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Besides English, the novels will also be published in other languages, such as Korean, Spanish and Vietnamese.

Liu Yuren, the website's manager, says that technology will help the website to grow in terms of quantity and translation quality.

While in traditional publishing, translating, editing and releasing a foreign version of a new work may require time, a quick work in this regard was the Chinese translation of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which took the translators a month before it was published by the China Citic Press.

In the realm of web novels, the chapters take less time.

"The internet values speed and sharing, and we're an internet-based technology company for content management," Liu says.

He says the website's global recruitment has brought them some 100 translators and 40 editors since March.

"The translators are bilingual and the editors oversee the quality, making it suitable and qualified for entertaining," he says.

The biggest challenge for Liu's team is to go through 10 million works in 200 themes by 4 million registered writers on the group's Chinese-language websites.

"Artificial intelligence and cloud computing will offer more ways to publish new stories and know more about the readers," Liu says.

Comments from foreign readers will also be read by the writers and play a role in their future storytelling, he adds.

Currently, among the most popular genres are fantasy and sci-fi.

At the Beijing event, Wu also announced that the group has launched a 200 million yuan ($29.4 million) fund to help develop more quality works and enhance cooperation with partners like traditional publishers.

"We believe we can dream bigger. We opened up the domestic market for web novels some 15 years ago. Now, we expect a 'renaissance' of Chinese literature online," he says.