About Translators Association of China

Translators Association of China

The Translators Association of China, abbreviated TAC and known in Chinese as Zhongguo Fanyi Xiehui, is China's only national association for translation and interpreting. It was founded in Beijing in June 1982 and is headquartered at 24 Baiwanzhuang Street in the Xicheng District of Beijing, under the China International Communications Group, formerly the China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration. Its official website is tac-online.org.cn. The association functions as both an academic society and an industry association: it represents, by its parent group's account, over 980,000 translators and interpreters nationwide through some 1,485 institutional members, 5,300 individual members, seventy-nine local and sectoral member associations and fifteen specialist committees covering fields from science and technology and law to literature, ethnic languages, translation theory and education, and interpreting.

TAC's work defines the professional infrastructure of translation in China. It has published the bimonthly Chinese Translators Journal since 1983, awards the Han Suyin Award for Young Translators and the national lifetime achievement honours in translation, led the drafting of China's first national translation-service standards after creating its Translation Service Committee in 2003, and supports the CATTI national accreditation system for translators and interpreters. It joined the International Federation of Translators in 1987, co-founded the Asian Translators Forum, and in 2008 co-hosted the eighteenth FIT World Congress in Shanghai, then the largest in FIT history.

Founding in 1982 and the reform-era context

The Translators Association of China was founded in June 1982, in the first years of China's reform and opening up. The association was part of the academic and professional response to the economic reform launched in 1978: as China reopened to the world, demand for translation exploded across government, publishing, trade and scholarship, while the Cultural Revolution had left a long hiatus in the training of translators and an alarming variation in the quality of available translations. A national body was needed to organise the profession, set standards and speak for translators and interpreters at the national level.

The writer Han Suyin, the Chinese-British author who became known as a bosom friend of Chinese translators and a bridge between China's translation community and the world, is credited in scholarship with helping to establish the association in 1982 and maintaining a cordial relationship with it thereafter. Her patronage connected the young association to the wider project of spreading Chinese literary culture abroad, and she later endowed the award for young translators that bears her name. The association's first president was Jiang Chunfang, who served from 1982 to 1992, in a founding leadership that drew honorary support from some of China's most eminent scholars and writers, among them Ji Xianlin, Yan Jici, Ba Jin, Qian Zhongshu, Zhu Guangqian and Lv Shuxiang.

Structure and membership

TAC is at once a learned society and the voice of an industry. Its parent group, the China International Communications Group (CICG), describes it as the voice for the translation and interpreting community in China at the national level, representing the interests of over 980,000 professional translators and interpreters through its institutional and individual membership and its committee system. Fifteen committees cover areas including science and technology, literature and arts, social sciences, legal affairs, ethnic languages, translation theory and education, and interpreting, while seventy-nine member associations at local or sectoral level carry the association's work into provinces and industries.

The association's annual congress is its most important event, drawing professionals and pooling resources from almost every segment of the translation and interpreting community in China and beyond. TAC is headed by CICG within China's foreign-language publishing system — CICG itself has translated the documents of the party and state and Chinese classics over seven decades — and the association's headquarters at 24 Baiwanzhuang Street places it in the Beijing district long associated with China's publishing houses.

Chinese Translators Journal

The association's scholarly flagship is the Chinese Translators Journal, published bimonthly since 1983 as TAC's official journal. It is ranked among the most influential language journals in China for its contribution to translation and interpreting studies and practice, and CICG describes it as one of the most authoritative journals of the highest academic level in China's translation field. The journal's editorial office also co-organises the Han Suyin competition, tying the association's publishing arm directly to its talent-development work.

The journal appeared at the opening of what scholars call the fourth wave of translation activity in China, the reform-era surge of translation of foreign texts into Chinese and of Chinese works outward. Through the Journal and its annual symposiums on translation and interpretation theory and practice, TAC provides the national forum in which Chinese translation studies debates its methods — the forum in which, for example, Han Suyin's own evolving philosophy of translation as an art and a creative process has been examined across the decades.

The Han Suyin Award and the translation contest

The Han Suyin Award for Young Translators was founded in 1986, and the competition that carries it, the Han Suyin International Translation Contest, was initiated in 1989 by the Translators Association of China and the editorial office of the Chinese Translators Journal under Han Suyin's sponsorship. It is the longest-running, largest and most influential translation competition in China: more than 40,000 participants entered in 2021 alone, and the thirty-seventh edition, whose award ceremony was held in Beijing on 22 November 2025, drew more than 31,000 participants and recognised 887 contestants, including twenty-one first-prize winners.

The contest examines both accuracy in linguistic transformation and depth of cross-cultural understanding, and its categories have widened with China's external engagement: the thirty-fourth contest, held in the association's fortieth anniversary year of 2022, offered twenty competition categories covering translation from Chinese into ten foreign languages, including English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Italian. Each edition is co-organised with a partner university — Tianjin Foreign Studies University in 2022, Dalian University of Foreign Languages for the thirty-seventh edition, with Soochow University announced for the next — making the contest a travelling institution of the translation-education system as well as an award.

Honours: lifetime achievement and senior translators

TAC administers China's hierarchy of professional honours in translation. The Lifelong Achievement Award, the China Translation Culture Lifetime Achievement Award first presented in 2006, is the most prestigious translation award in China; CICG records that it has been granted to thirty-seven widely revered expert translators and interpreters. The title of Senior Translator, rendered in some sources as Competent Translator and first awarded in 2004, has been bestowed on 3,485 veterans of the profession who have made outstanding contributions in translation practice.

The roll of senior translators maps the profession's history: American literature translators Li Wenjun, Zi Zhongyun, Shao Mujun and Mei Shaowu; English literature translators Tu An, Xu Yuanchong and Yang Jingyuan; French translators Zheng Yonghui and Gui Yufang; the German translator Liu Banjiu; Japanese translators Wen Jieruo and Ye Weiqu; the Korean translator Zhang Lin; the Persian translator Zhang Hongnian; the Polish translator Yi Lijun; a long line of Russian translators including Xie Sutai, Gao Mang and Xu Leiran; Indian literature translators Liu Anwu and Jin Dinghan; and Wang Yizhu, honoured for translation across Greek, Latin and seven modern languages. Together the awards give the association its role as the profession's memory and arbiter of eminence.

CATTI and professional accreditation

The association supports the China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters, CATTI, the most authoritative national-level translation and interpretation proficiency qualification test in China. Launched in 2003 by the Ministry of Personnel, CATTI is entrusted to CICG for implementation and administration under the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, and it was created to strengthen management of the translation field, standardise the translation job market, improve translators' capabilities and evaluate professional levels scientifically, objectively and impartially under uniform national standards.

The test is famously demanding. It assesses translators through comprehensive aptitude and translation practice papers, and interpreters through comprehensive aptitude and interpreting practice, with consecutive and simultaneous specialisations at the higher level. Commentary on the system records an average pass rate of only about eleven percent in the test's first eleven years, with some 35,000 certificates awarded from 295,000 candidates by 2013. Certification is maintained through continuing education credits earned in training given through the Translators Association of China, renewed every three years, which binds the national accreditation system back into the association's training work, including its National Training Programme for Teachers of Translation and Interpreting, the largest programme of its kind in China, which has trained more than 8,000 professionals from over 700 institutions.

Industry standards and the Translation Service Committee

TAC's second identity is as an industry association for China's language-service market. In 2003 it created its Translation Service Committee to regulate the domestic translation service market and promote ethical business practices, and under that committee's leadership China drafted its first national translation-service standards. The committee's salon meetings of translation companies — gatherings in Beijing in 2012, 2013 and 2014 attended by firms and institutions including the China Translation and Publishing Corporation, the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau and commercial providers — reviewed work such as the compilation of quotation standards for written translation and for interpretation services, and the national seminars on translation management.

Participants in those salons pressed the committee to do more in industry research, market regulation, standards development and service improvement as the language-service industry grew with China's trade and publishing. The association has also formed strategic alliances with overseas industry bodies, including the Netherlands-based translation technology think tank TAUS, extending its standards work into the era of machine translation and language data.

International engagement: FIT and the Asian Translators Forum

TAC joined the International Federation of Translators (FIT) in 1987, and its representatives have since served as FIT council members, one of them as a vice president of FIT. As a co-founder of the FIT Asian Translators Forum, it hosted the Forum's first session in 1995, helping to give Asian translation communities a standing regional institution. In 2011 TAC was admitted as an associate member of CIUTI, the international association of university translation institutes, and held the CIUTI Forum 2011 in Beijing, co-sponsored with Beijing Foreign Studies University.

The high point of this engagement came in 2008, when TAC co-hosted the eighteenth FIT World Congress with FIT in Shanghai. The congress set a record in FIT history for the number of participants, at 1,456, and remains the association's signature achievement on the world stage: China's translators, organised nationally only since 1982, hosting the global profession's largest gathering twenty-six years later. The association also co-organises the All China Interpreting Contest, held annually since 2010 with on average more than 5,000 participants and a record of over 10,000 in 2021.

Presidents and leadership

The association's presidents trace the profession's rising public standing. Jiang Chunfang served from 1982 to 1992, Ye Shuifu from 1992 to 1998, Song Shusheng from 1998 to 2004 and Liu Xiliang from 2004 to 2009. In 2009 the presidency passed to Li Zhaoxing, the former foreign minister of China, who chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress and led the association's sixth executive committee — a diplomat at the head of the translators' body, underlining translation's place in China's external work. Later presidents recorded in the association's summaries include Zhou Mingwei and Du Zhanyuan, the former vice minister of education who has led CICG's translation work in recent years.

Honorary leadership has carried equal weight. Ji Xianlin served as vice president from 1982 to 1992 and honorary consultant thereafter; honorary presidents and consultants have included Ba Jin, Qian Zhongshu, Zhu Guangqian, Xie Bingxin (Bing Xin) and Yang Jiang — names that connect the association to the greatest generation of modern Chinese letters, for whom translation was a central literary act.

Significance

The Translators Association of China is the institution through which translation in China became a profession: organised nationally, examined through CATTI, standardised through its service committee, honoured through its awards, studied through its journal and represented abroad through FIT. Founded in June 1982, when China was reopening and translators were scarce and unevenly trained, it now speaks for a community its parent group counts at more than 980,000 practitioners.

From its headquarters at 24 Baiwanzhuang Street in Beijing, the association continues to hold its annual congress, publish the Chinese Translators Journal every two months, run the Han Suyin International Translation Contest for a new generation of young translators and carry China's translation community into international forums. In a country whose engagement with the world runs through language, TAC remains the national association of the people who make that engagement intelligible.