Publishing houses (all types): 2,330 (UK); 1,738 (Taiwan); 573 (China)
Over 95% of all literary works translated into Chinese over the last five years were published by just 17 firms
China pay for English-to-Chinese literary translation: RMB 50-100 per 1,000 words (US$7.31 to US$14.62) in the target language
Figures from a speech by Kite Runner translator Li Ji-Hong (李继宏) at the recent China-UK Forum on Marketing Literature in Translation in Shanghai (Jan 12-14, 2009). His new firm, 上海帛书文化传播有限公司, will focus on purchasing the rights to foreign books for publication within China.
By Bruce Humes, January 14, 2:06p.m.
Interview with the translators of Wang Gang's “English" (王刚写的 《英格力士》)
The Transparent China Translator (II)
By Bruce Humes (徐穆实)
www.bruce-humes.com
Chinese Books, English Reviews
“Among the Emperor Qianlong’s trophies from his conquest of Xinjiang was a girl called Iparhan. She was a beautiful Kashgari whose body was said to give off an intoxicating scent without any help from ointments…the abduction of Iparhan became for the Chinese a symbol of the annexation of the western lands which they had twice before conquered—under the Han and Tang dynasties—but never really controlled.”
(“Wild West China”) (1)
Much has ensued since the 18th century Qing emperor snatched this enchantress from Kashgar, located near today’s Kyrgyzstan, and transplanted the "Fragrant Concubine" (香妃) to his far-flung harem in Beijing.
The ethnic make-up of Xinjiang, for instance. Once home to an overwhelmingly Muslim, Turkic-speaking population—94 percent of the residents when the PRC was founded in 1949—the “Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region” has been mightily diluted by Han Chinese who, by 2007, reportedly accounted for four of ten inhabitants.(2)
But the legendary fascination of Chinese for Things Xinjiang—the music and dancing of the Uyghurs, the cuisine and particularly the women—endures. In its own unique way, the upcoming publication of “English,” a novel by Wang Gang, a Han who grew up in Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution, brings those fantasies firmly into our era, and embellishes them a bit.
More…
By Bruce Humes, January 2, 8p.m.
