Honoring the nation's great communicators

Announced at the same event were 115 winners of the Senior Translators Award and six awardees of the Outstanding Foreign Translation Expert Award.

China Daily's Ian Morrison, who participated in the paper's coverage of the 19th and 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and several editions of the two sessions, is among the recipients of the latter.

During the TAC Annual Conference 2023, the association also released its annual reports on Chinese and global translation and language service industries.

Statistics show that despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the domestic translation and language service industry delivered a rapid growth, with the total output value exceeding 65 billion yuan ($9.5 billion) for the first time last year, an increase of 17.2 percent compared to that of 2021.

The market has urgent demand for translation services in German, French, English, Japanese and Italian, particularly in the fields of information and communication technology, cross-border e-commerce and education.

With the Belt and Road Initiative and increasing cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the industry is also calling for more talent proficient in Southeast Asian languages.

According to the report, there are more than 6 million people involved in the domestic market last year, with a slight drop in full-time translators, at 0.92 million, and an increase of 15.7 percent in part-time talent.

The global industry report shows that the market value reached $52 billion in 2022. The output value of China's translation and language service industry has grown faster than the global average over the past five years.

Meanwhile, Chinese enterprises actively participated in international service trade last year, with their overseas translation business mainly coming from the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, the United States and Italy, among others.