On the afternoon of June 30, 2021, Dr. Meng Yongye, an expert member of BFSU Research Center for Country-specific Translation and Interpretation Capacity, the Deputy Secretary General of Interpretation Committee of Translators Association of China (TAC), and an external supervisor of Hebei University, was invited to deliver an academic lecture entitled “Overview and Development Trend of the Global Language Service Industry” at our college. The lecture was held in the Practical Training Room of our College and was presided over by Associate Professor Zhang Chengzhi, Executive Deputy Director of MTI Education Center, with more than 100 teachers and students from the College of Foreign Languages and Department of Foreign Languages Teaching in attendance.

In the lecture, Dr. Meng first analyzed the current development of global language service industry, the distribution of corporate headquarters and output value, followed by the prediction of the impact of COVID-19 epidemic on the global output value variation based on three models, including slow growth, growth following GDP and GDP+. Dr. Meng also discussed the future development trend of language services based on language services, non-language services and language technology, and talked about the price, machine translation, online services, remote interpretation, speech processing and audio-visual tools, and proposed the version 2.0 for the future development direction of language services—global content management.

In the end, Dr. Meng answered the questions raised by students and teachers from his own experience. Professor Ye Huijun, Dean of our College, made a concluding speech and expressed heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Meng for his presence. She expressed that his entrepreneurial experience and interdisciplinary personal career growth was worthy of reference, and his humorous and insightful lecture was beneficial for the teachers and students. The whole lecture was informative and insightful, and the atmosphere was active and interactive.