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China, being a growing super power, is everywhere in the news today. Part of China’s success has been its ability to compete in the global market due to its cheap labor cost and its incredibly high number of English speakers.

But China passed a recent law banning English to be printed in Media and on the Internet. This seems like an outlandish concept for a country that has over 10,000,000 English speakers, according to the Wikipedia based on a survey several years back. The numbers must be much bigger now.

China also requires its students to learn over 20,000 English words and is expected to have a larger number of English speakers by 2025 than the rest of the world population combined.

The ban, which was put in place by the General Administration of Press and Publication, is a result of the belief that English or half-English (I am coining the phrase Chinglish, you heard it here first. ?) is a threat to the purity of the Chinese language and is a disruption to China’s “harmonious and healthy cultural environment.”

English words or abbreviations can only be used if a Chinese translation immediately follows. This is an interesting concept for the translation industry as I imagine that someone will have to create new Chinese words for words that were previously expressed in English. The ruling is so serious that violators will be punished by law.

One company that has already seen repercussions even before the official ruling is Yeeyan, which is a news site dedicated to translating English news into Chinese and vice-versa. They have been taken offline several times by the Chinese government and have struggled to remain online. Let’s see how they accomplish this with the new ruling…

Last weekend, I entered a store in a shopping mall and the sales clerk began chatting with me about professions, education and so forth. She went on about how she finishes her Journalism studies next year and how, even though she’s in college, it was really tough for anyone to do well in that area, really tough to “get there.” “In Engineering, it’s easy to do well, but not in Journalism,” she added. I don’t know what she meant by “getting there” — I don’t know if a journalist’s dream is to become the anchor on prime-time television or what —, but that statement aroused my curiosity.

I believe it’s possible to be successful or not in any profession. In Brazil, a good example comes from the teachers, whose income is knowingly low, but many of them still make a fair or even a great living out of their work!

So how do we “get there” in our sector? Or better yet, what does getting there even mean exactly? Is it about getting paid well or becoming recognized? And what would that recognition be?

We all know that you don’t need a specific education to work as a translator; “all” you need to do is translate from one language into the other, and ideally write well in the target language. So for me, “getting there” means doing a good job and getting my deserved personalcompensation, not only in terms of self-esteem but also financially, since no one wants to live out of charity.