More than 10,500 Chinese-speaking tourists visited the famed Newport mansions with bus tour groups in 2007, a number that museum officials expect will grow as an estimated 100 million Chinese travel outside their homeland by 2020.
"We have a greater and greater demand from our visiting public for translations in Mandarin," said Trudy Coxe, CEO of The Preservation Society of Newport County.
This month, Coxe signed an agreement with Bryant University at a ceremony inside Belmont's teahouse in which students at Bryant will translate the tour scripts for several of the city's mansions into Mandarin, the common language of China. The university will also provide Mandarin-speaking tour guides during the busy summer season.
Major Chinese tourist destinations such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hawaii, Nevada, and New York City have worked with the Chinese government to ease rules hampering the tourism industry. But much smaller players could also reap benefits from a broader agreement the US government reached in December that allows Chinese travel agencies to market packaged tours to the United States. It also permits US destinations to advertise directly to the Chinese public.
Few Chinese tourists, if any, visit the United States just to see the Newport mansions. But Chinese bus tour operators often stop for a few hours in Newport while shuttling between New York, Boston, Cape Cod, and Montreal, said Dan Fryer, who coordinates the bus tours for the Preservation Society.
In Newport, those tour groups generally head straight for The Breakers, a spectacular 70-room Italian Renaissance-style palazzo that the Vanderbilt family, steamship and railroad magnates, called their "summer cottage."
The need for better Mandarin translations became evident in September when Bryant officials took pingpong star Zhuang Zedong to The Breakers during a tour of Rhode Island. Zhuang's 1971 encounter with an American pingpong player during a competition in Japan helped spark "pingpong diplomacy" between President Richard Nixon and Chinese leader Mao Zedong.
