Chinese IT giant Alibaba is set to launch a new translation platform at the end of this year, General Manager of Alibaba Language Services Liu Yu told China.org.cn during the fourth China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing.
Liu said the new platform is designed to help create business opportunities for language service providers and remove language barriers for small and medium-sized corporations who want to gain a foothold in overseas markets.
"After years of growth, Alibaba has realized that language services are crucial to any business which is in the middle of globalization or engaged in cross-border ecommerce," said Liu.
The move came after Alibaba purchased 365 Fanyi (365 Translation), China's largest crowd-sourcing translation platform, last year.
365 Fanyi, founded in 2011, specialized in providing online translation and interpretation services to domestic and foreign clients.
The acquisition was considered part of Alibaba's efforts to help remove language barriers for small and medium-sized enterprises when participating in cross-border e-commerce business.
Luo Weihua, technology executive of Alibaba Language Services, asserted that Alibaba is hoping to build platforms to help small businesses go global.
"Selling goods to overseas markets entails three requirements: logistics, payment and information flow platform," said Luo. "Obviously, translation constitutes the information flow platform."
