A staff member of Dongzhimen subway station answers questions from a foreign passenger through a translator machine in Beijing, on March 29, 2024. Photo: VCG

While China's inbound and outbound travel continued to boom this summer with the holiday rush approaching, sales of translator machines have soared, the Global Times has learned.

There has been an increase in sales of translation machines recently, a spokesperson from Timekettle, told the Global Times on Wednesday, citing the company's Timekettle Fluentalk T1, a handheld translator device for travel.

While sales of translation machines rose, driven by increased inbound and outbound tourists, the rental business of portable translators has jumped too lately.

A 63-year-old Beijing resident surnamed Li told the Global Times that she rented a translator for her just-ended tour in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.

"Our travel group of four aunties needs a translator machine to conquer language barriers abroad. We are not good at speaking English. The machine not only translates Chinese into English, but also local languages, which makes communication much easier," said Li, adding that she rented a smart translator from iFLYTEK.

Companies are stepping up efforts to boost sales of their translation machines, the Global Times has learned.

"We have been considering cooperation with airports and land ports, so as to provide portable translation service to inbound and outbound travelers directly," the Timekettle spokesperson said. 

Timekettle's translator machines have been available in stores across more than 30 domestic airports, which enable users to take them for a test drive.

Thanks to a series of visa-free policies being implemented, more and more foreign tourists are visiting China now.

In the first half of 2024, the number of foreigners entering China increased 152.7 percent to reach 14.635 million, according to statistics released by the National Immigration Administration (NIA) on Tuesday.

Among them, 8.542 million foreigners entered China on a visa-free basis, accounting for 52 percent, an increase of 190.1 percent year-on-year.

In the first quarter of 2024, there was a significant 400-percent growth in inbound travel to China, driven by the benefits of the visa-free visits, according to a report shared byTrip.com with the Global Times.

It is expected that more foreigners will come to visit China in the second half of this year, a spokesperson from the NIA said.

Apart from tourism, China's expanding opening-up to the outside world also drove the growth of machine translation due to the increase in market demand.

According to Timekettle, its translator devices for business scenarios - W3 AI translator and X1 AI simultaneous interpreter - supported the 5th Passenger Loyalty China Summit held in late June.

A Yiwu-based businessperson surnamed Yu told the Global Times that recently, he received an order of sports products, valued at over 1 million yuan ($137,436), from a group of French businessmen, which should be greatly attributed to smooth communication through face-to-face simultaneous translation machine.

"I speak Chinese and they speak French. The translation device works as a simultaneous interpretation as if we can speak each other's languages," Yu said.