One question has been bugging me a lot lately, around the Marco Polo Project. A core, central, excruciating business question. Why would anyone actually  come to our website? I’ve had  lots of tactical answers so far, and they were good enough: people will come if we advertise properly and if we build strong networks, and they will stay if our website looks good, if it’s quick and efficient. This was supported by all sorts of documents, of how China’s definitely super-hot, and there’s a shortage of Chinese teachers, and online learning is the new frontier.

But that doesn’t address the core, hard question: why would anyone spend time on the Marco Polo Project, rather than reading blogs about China written in English, translating articles for wikipedia, or doing a language exchange on qq?

The only good answer I can give to that is: people will come to us if they’re  looking for the voice of original Chinese writers.

It sounds like a paradox, because one potential flaw in our model is that we’ll be relying on the work of amateurs for our translations – with potential loss of accurracy, and problems of quality control. And yet, I believe that we are the only translation and media platform that, from its conception and structure, really focuses on Chinese writing – in other words, on text construction, choice of words and point of view, rather than news and information.

Accordingly, once our platform is up, our work should be to filter, tag and bring up the best writing from the Chinese web, and build a strong editorial team with taste and intuition.

I believe that ‘information’ is not all that people are after, that the way things are said actually matters. I believe it is worthwhile to listen to Chinese voices, and follow the way they build an argument, or what steps they take when telling a story. I believe that even an amateur translation will carry most of that across. AndI believe that making efforts to translate not only ‘contents’ but an individual voice is the best exercise to build on your language skills.

At least that’s the bet I’m making, and that there’s a public for it.