Kong Yan, General Manager of the Chinese branch of Lionbridge, a multinational localization company with branches in 26 countries and regions, said that in the last 10 years, the translation service from English into Chinese has risen to become one of the company's three pillar translation services, along with English to Japanese and English to German.

Kong told Beijing Review that in the 10-year operation of Lionbridge China, its annual revenue had grown over 10-fold to around $13 million in 2007.

Localization came into being worldwide in the 1980s. In China, it has a short history of less than 15 years. The first start-up Chinese companies were founded to translate the English-version software of IBM and Microsoft into Chinese.

Now their business interests have been diversified to include software development, maintenance of content, application development and designing of localized websites.

Lin Yi, Managing Director of Celestone, a Beijing-based homegrown localization company, said Chinese companies going global and the foundation of research and development centers of large IT companies in China are two trends that can be new points of growth for Chinese localization companies.

"In general, compared with their foreign competitors, these Chinese companies don't have enough knowledge of localization. Even the senior leadership of these companies sometimes simplifies localization as translation, which is incorrect," said Lin, whose company was a sponsor of the congress.

He used the design of the company website as an example. He said when his company helped a global computer-chip manufacturer to localize its e-commerce website in China, they produced a page in Chinese much busier than its English counterpart. "This is how Chinese readers are going to like it," he said.

He said Chinese localization companies want to go global with their Chinese partners. "For the time being, localization is known to such a small population in China that during recruitment I have to first explain what we are doing," said Li Shi, Vice President of Hisoft Services.

A total of six localization companies, all founding members of the Localization Service Network of TAC, sponsored the world congress. "We want to bring more attention to this industry and attract qualified translators to join us," said Lin.