MTS Provided Translation Service for Kulangsu’ Heritage Applying Program

On Saturday, July 8th, 2017, Kulangsu, a small island off the shore of Xiamen, Fujian Province, was added to the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage list at the 41st session of World Heritage Committee in Krakow, Poland. As a local company of Xiamen and the translation vendor of the heritage applying program, Master Translation Services is very proud of Kulangsu’s success. At the same time, we’d also like to thank all of our staff and partners who made their contributions to the heritage application program.

In the first half of the year 2016, Kulangsu’s heritage application program entered the essential stage of the preparation work, and MTS became the contracted translation supplier. Our company’s leaders coordinated the resources of all the parties and selected a number of experienced members from the production center, project management team, corpus management team and quality assurance management team to set up a particular group for the program. From pre-project communication and preparation, the development of translation guides and standards, term-base construction, to the supervision of project schedule, quality management, corpus improvement and feedback mechanism during the project, we developed a series of effective measures to ensure smooth implementation and delivery of the project.The documents that needed to be translated included: comprehensive information of the Kulangsu heritage, the introduction of the site’s core elements, cultural characteristics, important historical figures, some important residents, exhibition halls, etc. Thanks to the trust of the Kulangsu administrative committee and the heritage application program office, we were given such an opportunity to serve Xiamen. The success of the heritage applying program’s translation work is a great achievement in our 18 years’ experience in the translation industry and we are very proud of it.

Background information:

Kulangsu, located in Xiamen, China’s Jiulong River estuary, is a small island with the area of only 1.88 square kilometers. After the Opium War in 1843, Xiamen was opened as a treaty port, and Kulangsu gradually became the residence of Westerners. In 1902, “Kulangsu Public Territorial Charter ” was signed. With the joint efforts of local Chinese, returning overseas Chinese and foreign residents from many countries, Kulangsu developed into an international community with outstanding cultural diversity and modern quality of life, and also the ideal settlement of the overseas Chinese and elites who are active in East Asia and Southeast Asia. Kulangsu is now retained with 931 historical buildings, gardens and natural landscape, historical road network with different local and international styles, which embodies the integration of modern habitat concepts and local traditional culture.The World Heritage Committee believes that Kulangsu is a witness to China’s early stages of globalization, with distinctive cultural diversity and modern quality of life.