SurroundApp.asia:微博翻譯應用讓老外更懂中國的智慧手機應用，目前還比較簡單，包括檢視主資訊流上的微博、將非轉發微博進行翻譯、在 app 上評論、轉發微博、釋出文字微博等。
中英文間的隔閡正在變小，但兩者之間的距離依舊比你想象得大。當微博已經成為華人社群很大的新聞媒體、民生入口，那些不懂中文的人也想一探究竟。即使微博開通了英文介面，像 Brad Pitt 這樣來了又登出的人依舊不在少數，因為他們根本就不懂中文，看不懂這個入口裡的人們在說什麼。
Surroundapp 的使用者群很特殊。首先，在國內的外國人本身會有留學生會、商會組織等自己的社交圈子，這個圈子很集中，容易形成口碑效應。
目前SurroundApp並不會提供 100% 精準的翻譯，但通過 Surround 也能大概瞭解別人在講什麼了。微博上本身有很多網路、口語化的語言，他們目前的翻譯方法是將口語化的文字和一些俚語放進詞庫做翻譯的對應。“比如‘我妹（I sitster）’翻譯成英文應該是 my sister。
Have you ever encountered any problem communicating with people in China? Introducing a mobile app called Surround, we aim to help you build effective relationship with Chinese community anytime anywhere by providing real time translation for reading and writing posts on Chinese social media platforms like Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, QQ, RenRen, QZone and WeChat.
Did you know 1 out of 5 online users worldwide are Chinese? Today, China is the second largest economy in the world and forecasted to be number one in five to ten years time. With exponential market growth and globalization, there is increasing importance to interact with Chinese professionally and personally.
China has the world’s most active social media users. By reaching almost 90% of Chinese netizens, Weibo is a perfect place for non-Chinese people not only to engage with Chinese but also learn about their culture and hot talking topics to start a meaningful conversation.
To begin, we are building the platform to access Sina Weibo – one of the leading social media platforms with 400 million registered users (vs 500 million of Twitter) and over 260,000 enterprise accounts as of November 2012. Sina Weibo has a mobile app that can be switched to English, but a lot of labels are still in Chinese, like “# of Followers”, “# of Posts” and system messages. We are going to solve that by developing our own English labels for static content and using translation API for translating posts and comments. The translation of posts and comments is not aiming to be a full and correct translation, but to give an idea what a post or comment is about.
