By Kathy Keyi Jia

As the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada celebrates its 50th anniversary, I find myself reflecting on another milestone that also marks a kind of bridge across time and culture.

This year happens to be the 30th anniversary of a historic partnership between CBC Newsworld International (NWI) and China Central Television (CCTV) — an extraordinary joint venture even by today’s standards. I had the privilege of helping to launch the program and working on it for several years as a translator and unofficial language and cultural consultant.

The project reflected remarkable foresight. Long before the internet, Google Translate, or AI, CBC NWI began airing original daily news programs from several countries — including China, Germany, and Japan — providing Canadian and international audiences with rare, unfiltered perspectives at a time when most world news came through a handful of dominant networks.

For CCTV, this marked its first English-language broadcast outside China, reaching audiences across the U.S., the Caribbean, and Mexico via satellite from Canada. For CBC NWI, it was an opportunity to showcase world events through different cultural and linguistic lenses — something that feels as valuable now as it was then.

“It was a unique initiative,” recalled Sandy McKean, then Executive Producer of NWI and later Head of English Television at the CBC. “The two sides signed a formal agreement — something that would still be hard to imagine today.”

At the outset, we all faced challenges. The anchors were introduced to a brand-new format, tone, and rhythm from a different culture, and I was tasked with ensuring my English scripts matched perfectly with the original Chinese footage — down to the second.

The challenge wasn’t just about translating the contents but also about cultural nuance, tone, and timing. Chinese is compact and largely monosyllabic. “Beautiful,” for instance, is simply mei 美 . English phrases often ran longer, so every line had to be accurate yet concise, while still matching the original pacing and emotion of the video, frame by frame.

And this was all done in the 1990s — long before digital tools or cloud backups. Computer crashes were not rare. My first day’s note read:

“Start translation at 3:45 p.m. The computer crashed at 5:00 p.m., lost highlights and first piece of translation. Rebooted. Locked out again at 7:30. Rebooted at 8:00 p.m…”

Some of our younger members may never have had such fun! But thanks to the support from Sandy McKean and my previous radio experience, I powered through, fueled by four cups of coffee, fingers flying across the keyboard to meet the 11:00 p.m. deadline before catching the last subway home.

That project has largely faded from public memory now, but for me, it remains vivid — how could it not, when you worked on every word of every script for several years? Now when I look at the yellowing pages of those English scripts, with their time markings and notes for the anchors, I’m still filled with a sense of pride— a feeling I believe many fellow translators can relate to.

Technology has evolved beyond anything we could have imagined, but our fundamental task as translators remains unchanged. We are an important bridge — connecting literatures, cultures, minds and hearts — word by word, or frame by frame – often unseen, but always indispensable.

Bio

Kathy Keyi Jia joined the LTAC in the mid 1990s as its first Chinese–English and English–Chinese translator. She helped launch the CBC Newsworld International – China Central Television joint program in the 90s, and later worked as a bilingual journalist for Radio Canada International. She was a professor of Cross-Cultural Communication and the author of Effective Intercultural Communication and Conflict Solving (Nelson Education, 2012).