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Cindy Carter is a Beijing-based translator of Chinese fiction, film, essay and poetry. She studied Japanese at U.C. San Diego and lived in Osaka for three years before coming to China as a language student in 1996. Since beginning her translation career in 1999, she has translated over forty independent Chinese films and documentaries and dozens of scripts, short stories, essays and poems. Her translation of Xiaolu Guo's novel Village of Stone (2004, Chatto & Windus, Random House, U.K.) was short-listed for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and long-listed for the IMPAC Prize.
Her recent translation projects include:
Yan Lianke's Dream of Ding Village, a novel about blood-selling and the AIDS epidemic in Henan Province (scheduled for publication in 2009 by Constable and Robinson, U.K.)
Yu Guangyi's Survival Song, a documentary about a family of hunter-trappers living in the wilds of Heilongjiang Province (Grand Prize winner, 5th China Independent Documentary Film Festival, Songzhuang, 2008; Grand Prize winner, Cinema Digital Seoul Festival, 2008; Selection, Vancouver Int'l Film Festival, 2008)
Huang Wenhai's Creatures of Politics, Voices of Conscience, a documentary about human rights and democracy activists in China (Worldwide premiere at the 2008 Venice Int'l Film Festival - under the Chinese title "Women"/我们)
Historian and translator extraordinaire Jonathan Spence will give the prestigious 60th anniversary BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures.
The series of four lectures, entitled Chinese Vistas, will be broadcast weekly at 9.00am on Radio 4, beginning on 3 June 2008. (Nice date for a lecture series on China, don't you think?)
See this press release for more info and links.
By Cindy Carter, May 23, 3a.m.
Although this may be of limited interest for those of you not resident in China, the recent confusion over visa renewals has caused some consternation in our circles, the little campfires around which yours truly, and her fellow translators-in-arms, are bivouacked.
Here’s a post from Danwei.org related to the great summer 2008 visa kerfuffle: Visa, visa, where are you.
You might ask why, in light of these changes, we translators don’t simply find a related day job or link up with some corporate sponsor willing to support our endeavors. The answer: there is no such thing as a company dedicated to literary translation in China. Ditto for film translation. Translation companies, such as they are, offer rates that fall tragically short of a living wage (particularly for our Chinese colleagues; we Chinese-to-English translators are somewhat better off), and they tend to focus on technical, legal, medical or commercial translation.
Advertising companies pay handsomely, but who wants to spend four or five hours per day convincing the Chinese populace to buy more cars/smoke more cigarettes/consume more meat, imported or domestic? Wages aside, there’s a way to be a person, and a person’s got to sleep. Besides, after a decade or so of studying Chinese, wouldn’t our time be better spent translating authors and filmmakers such as Yan Lianke, Li Er, Wang Xiaobo, Wang Xiaoshuai, Tian Zhuangzhuang or Luo Yan, rather than salvaging cheap ad copy for Audi, Pepsi, Avon, Budweiser or Ford?
A far more common option is to cadge or chivvy a friend or colleague into putting one on the books as a foreign hire, the recipient of a coveted “Z” work visa. In the short-term, it seems an easy solution...but keep in mind the old adage about favors: “The most expensive things in China are free.”
The upshot of this diatribe is that, effective July 7 of 2008, I honestly don’t know where I’ll be.
Addendum: July 4, 2008
As it turns out, I did manage to renew my visa (for a princely sum) and am now legal and registered to live in China until September of 2008. By September or October of 2008, things should be back to normal.
By Cindy Carter, May 8, 9p.m.
The May 4, 2008 edition of the New York Times Book Review features reviews of four new translations of Chinese novels:
- Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, translated by Howard Goldblatt
- Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, translated by Howard Goldblatt
- Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, translated by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan (includes chapter excerpt)
- Yan Lianke’s Serve the People, translated by Julia Lovell (includes chapter excerpt)
One interesting, and rather humbling, note: the two books translated by Howard Goldblatt total 1067 English language pages. 1067 pages, people. As someone who counts herself lucky, very lucky, to get through 1000 characters of literary translation per day, I can’t imagine how he does it and still manages to find time to sleep. Damn, I could have/should have/would have asked him that at the Moganshan translation seminar…
(Thanks to fellow-translator Bruce Humes for giving us the heads-up on these reviews.)
By Cindy Carter, May 6, 10a.m.
