For Shi Yi, a 37-year-old insurance broker, the Economist magazine is the prime motivation for his voluntary translation website. Courtesy of Sanlian Life Weekly

Every day, 26-year-old Li Yanbo spends one or two hours translating English articles from the Internet. He then posts his translations on www.yeeyan.com, a website which says its aim is to "discover, translate and read the essence of the Internet world in non-Chinese languages".

Li usually reads and translates articles on the subject that interests him the most - how to start and build one's own business - and posts his translations on a Yeeyan link called "Go It Alone", named after a book by Bruce Judson on the same subject. Li has also translated the book into Chinese and posted it on Yeeyan.

"Many people of my generation dream of starting their own business, but there are hardly any books about such experiences in China," says Li, who works for a foreign trade company. "I read Go It Alone on the Internet and found it very useful. When I recommended the book to my friends, some of them were not able to read it in English, so I decided to translate it."

When Li posted the chapters he had translated on Yeeyan, they aroused much interest with readers asking for more. Encouraged by this response, he kept up with his translations and was finished the whole book in 2007.

Though Li is yet to find a publishing house to release his translation, he says he enjoyed the work. "People of my generation want to share," he says.

Yeeyan has more than 400 links put together by voluntary translators. Most deal with economy and technology, but there are some that touch on social themes.

For example, Shi Beichen, a 23-year-old student of Tianjin University of Commerce, has started "Society and Social Issues" and "China In Foreigners' Eyes".

"On the Internet, there is much more information in English than in Chinese. If we don't get this information, we will be left behind," Shi says.

It is this same belief that drove Zhao Jiamin, Zhang Lei and Ding Ding, three Tsinghua University graduates, to found Yeeyan in December 2006 when they were working in Silicon Valley in the United States.

"We found that on the Internet information in Chinese and English was not equally balanced. At that time, we three also wanted to do something of our own, so we decided to establish Yeeyan," says the 35-year-old Zhao, who came back to China last year and now works full-time for Yeeyan.