Volunteer Translators in the Epidemic: Use Overseas Aid for First-Line Rescue as Soon as Possible

The coronavirus Wuhan has touched everyone’s heart since its outbreak in January 2020. The novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia caused a shortage of prevention and control supplies so governments at all levels needed to purchase these materials overseas. Meanwhile, to handle a large number of donated overseas supplies translators were needed to look up  foreign standards and  compare them with national standards, so that these supplies could  be used accurately and effectively. Therefore, there was a desperate need for many minority language translators , especially Japanese and Korean translators.

The Party Branch of the Asian-European Language Department was one of the first batch of the Party Branch Secretary’s Studios of “Double Leader” Teachers in Colleges and Universities. Based on the minority language majors of the SFS and in response to the China National Defense Epidemic Translator Volunteer Group’s urgent recruiting of online translators, undergraduates and graduates majoring in Japanese were encouraged to give full play to their professional expertise and make a contribution to the fight against the epidemic

More than 10 undergraduates, graduates and postgraduates majoring in Japanese in USTB immediately signed up to participate in the voluntary work to fight against the epidemic. Among them, 3 undergraduates in Japanese enrolled in 2016 and 1 postgraduate in MTI (Japanese) enrolled in 2017 were recruited in the first batch of the volunteer translation team. Their first translation task for overseas aid supplies was reported on CCTV News  on February 2.

Jing Jiayu, one of the first translation volunteers of the SFS, said, “As a college student in the new era, I am extremely excited and honored to be able to take full advantage of my expertise to participate in the prevention and control of the epidemic! This is the first time that, as an ordinary student, I have been able to make contributions to the country with what I have learned, and fight against the epidemic in order to  protect Wuhan! I wish my motherland an early victory against the epidemic, and I will study hard to serve my motherland.”

At present, students in this volunteer translation project are ready for the second batch of translation tasks.