On 19 October 2016, the agreement for jointly building MTI Teaching & Practicing Base and Laboratory affiliated to Language Big Data Alliance (LBDA) was signed between Faculty of Humanities and Foreign Languages of Xi’an University of Technology (hereafter referred to as “XUT”) and Global Tone Communication Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. (hereafter refers to “GTCOM”), which means “Cross-Language Big Data Laboratory” was officially established at the faculty.

GTCOM is the holding subsidiary of China Translation Corporation. Integrating the world-leading natural language processing technologies, big data technology as well as billions of multilingual translation corpus and huge translators pool accumulated in over 40 years, GTCOM has established “YeeSight” big data analysis platform, “YeeCloud” language service platform and “Yeekit” professional tools platform, having become a world-leading cross-language big data service provider.

At the signing ceremony

The signing ceremony was hosted by Prof. Yin Pei’an, Assistant Dean of Faculty of Humanities and Foreign Languages. Prof. Li Qingming, Dean of the Faculty, Prof. Yang Yuan, Assistant Dean of Graduate School of XUT, Wu Yongping, Director of the Office of the Faculty, Jia Liping, Director of English Department, Zhang Jie, Director of MTI Education Center as well as Ms. Zhang Xiaodan, Deputy General Manager of GTCOM, Mr. Ni Yongjian, Manager of University Cooperation Department of GTCOM and Mr. Song Yuheng, Region Manager of the Department attended the ceremony.

The signing ceremony

In the first place, Ms. Zhang Xiaodan introduced in detail the achievements of GTCOM in such fields as machine translation, artificial intelligent, language service, language big data, and language laboratory, etc. She expressed the hope of comprehensive and deep cooperation between GTCOM which possesses the multinational language service resources and Faculty of Humanities and Foreign Languages with the discipline advantage of MTI Technological English, Water Resources & Hydro-electric Engineering and Equipment Manufacturing, etc. in many aspects, including practice base and corpus building, projects application and coordination, co-establishment of collaborative innovation center and courses, so as to cultivate more market-oriented senior translation talents.

Then, Prof. Li Qingming presented the development and features of MTI of Faculty of Humanities and Foreign Languages. He stated the target of the Faculty is to nurture high-end, application-oriented and professional translation talents with proficient translation skills and broad knowledge on the basis of discipline advantages in Water Resources & Hydro-electric Engineering and Equipment Manufacturing and under the guidance of “foreign language + expertise” talent cultivation idea. He believed that the resources and platform of GTCOM can provide students with broad development space and training and internship opportunities, which will broaden their views, and be beneficial to their future career development. In the meanwhile, he desired to cooperate with GTCOM in high-level school-enterprise cooperation projects application, and corpus and collaborative innovation center building.

Finally, Prof. Yang Yuan gave a high praise of GTCOM’s achievements in the field of translation both at home and abroad. She said the win-win cooperation between GTCOM. and XUT can promote the long-term development of each other. And she expects fruitful accomplishments to be achieved in students practice, jointly teaching and projects cooperation soon. The graduate school will keep an eye on and give a full support to the cooperation as well.

Participants attending the ceremony

After the signing ceremony for establishing cross-language big data school-enterprise alliance base, Ms. Zhang Xiaodan, Deputy General Manager of GTCOM made a lecture on “Language + Interest =Profession – the Career for Language-Majored Students” to more than 200 teachers and students. Through representing her own career in the language service industry, she shared her valuable experience in a heuristic and humorous way on career choosing and development direction for language-majored students, how to grow into a good translator and so on. In the end of the lecture, Ms. Zhang answered questions from and interacted with audiences and brought the house down.

Ms. Zhang Xiaodan, Deputy General Manager of GTCOM is making keynote lecture

Students on the spot

Ms. Zhang is discussing with a student