The Seattle Times pays a visit to Google's Beijing outpost to see how the search giant is dealing with the pressure of high expectations, and continued government involvement. "We never left China,"
Boon-Lock Yeo, head of Google's engineering and research teams in China, tells the newspaper in reference to the widely held assumption in the United States that the company had raised the white flag.
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Still, admits Yeo, "There were periods of uncertainty." What's more, "There have been some changes," says Xi Cheng, an Oxford-educated Googler working on the translate team. "But we
are still here. And it's still business as usual."
Cheng's job is to study the effectiveness of Google's automated translation service in 60 languages. Even though he works some 6,000
thousand miles from Silicon Valley, he and his China-based colleagues regularly interact with colleagues on the other side of the Pacific. "You are not just in China working on China-specific
products," Cheng said. "We are working on global products. Information flows freely."
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