Which Chinese books should be translated?

Joachim
October 15, 2008, 09:04 PM posted in General Discussion

As China will be next year's guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009, the Chinese "General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP)" will fund translations of fiction and non-fiction books by Chinese authors into German and/ or other languages.

For more details see: http://www.de-cn.net/mmo/priv/3186924-STANDARD.pdf (German)

If you want to suggest a book: info@biz-beijing.org (certain conditions apply).

 

 

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pearltowerpete
October 16, 2008, 01:43 AM

I had a professor who said that there is a special place in Hell for Sinologists who translate the Tao Te Ching, Confucian Analects, etc. into English or other European languages.

His point was that there is so much good stuff to work on, and that field is already so over-grazed. Let's look at Song ci or some of the Ming philosophical stuff!

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Joachim
October 16, 2008, 10:24 AM

pearltowerpete: I don't think it's mainly about translating Chinese classical literature. The focus is more on modern and present day literature.

Which modern author should be translated, then?

Wang Xiaobao has not been translated into German. To my knowledge, there's only an English translation of one of his books (Golden Age, actually).