Our News, Your News
By Nicky Harman, December 18, '17
Edizioni Ca' Foscari are proud to announce the publication of the first volume of the peer-reviewed series "Translating Wor(l)ds". Littérature chinoise et globalisation. Enjeux linguistiques, traductologiques et génériques, edited by Nicoletta Pesaro and Yinde Zhang, is available in open access here
Lots of interesting articles by eminent translators and academics like Martina Codeluppi, Nicoletta Pesaro, Victor Vuilleumier, Yinde Zhang, Shuang Xu, Noël Dutrait, Paolo Magagnin and Barbara Leonesi.
On the list: Can Xue/Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping, and Chan Ho-Kei/Jeremy Tiang.
It is timely to encounter these works [essays in Jottings] today, for although the People’s Republic is anything but voiceless under Xi Jinping, it has paradoxically become silent. Censorship and fear are commonplace, as has so often been the case in the past, and there is cowed conformity. Instead of celebrating a polyphony of voices, Xi Jinping and his propagandists extol Official China, one that speaks in a monotone allowing only for one, unified narrative: “The China Story.” In this story dissent has been quelled and heterodox views eliminated.
Conditions in China, with strong government controls over (physical) publication -- of books and magazines -- certainly were conducive to an explosive growth of online publication unlike anywhere else. As Hockx notes, the requirement of a 'book number' (ISBN) for the publication of any book in China has presented a considerable hurdle, and allowed for continued strong state control over what gets published in physical form. While online-publishing is not a "free-for-all from which state regulators have withdrawn entirely", control has been both lighter and not as far-reaching -- including for the simple logistical reason that it's nearly impossible to keep track of everything published online. Hockx provides numerous interesting examples of how the state has tried to maintain order -- and what the red lines are (such as the treatment of sexually explicit material) --, as well the evasive maneuvers authors and publishers can take, such as avoiding the use of terms that are readily flagged (and coming up with creative substitutes).
Dà Zhōnghuá Júyùwǎng 大中华局域网
Qualifications for entrance to Chinternet: 1) Server based on the mainland, where the law permits censorship and unrestricted government access to end-user data, 2) For sites with servers outside the PRC, politically correct content
According to the company's [China Reading's] IPO prospectus, during the first half of 2017, active users of the reading platform reached 191.8 million, comprising 179.3 million smart phone users and 12.5 million computer surfers. Its business models in forms of VIP charges and categorized authors lead in the online reading industry, thanks to the industrial mogul Wu Wenhui, who initiated and promoted the acquisition and founded the online publishing and reading function.
The major revenue source is readers' fees - exemplified by China Reading's 84.9 percent of income generated by payments for online reading during the first half of 2017.
Just one of the many articles and interviews anticipating Anna Holmwood's translation of "A Hero Born", the first volume in Jin Yong's series Legends of the Condor Heroes. Publication due February 2018 - we can't wait!
By Helen Wang, November 21, '17
As usual, we at Paper Republic have assembled a list of book-length translations from Chinese into English over the year. Congratulations to all authors and translators! This year’s list is longer than ever, and several books have won international prizes. Your additions, comments, corrections to this list are welcome - please leave a comment below and we’ll update the list.
This is our sixth annual list; previous lists are here: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016.
More…
By David Haysom, November 19, '17
The inaugural EU-China International Literary Festival is taking place this week, with authors from Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Slovakia taking part in events with local authors across Beijing and Chengdu.
Visit the official site for a complete list of events (many of which will be live streamed).
More…
Holmwood said that many Chinese fans of Jin Yong have been “quite obsessed” with how she would translate the myriad names of martial arts moves in the novels in particular. Some of the translations used by Holmwood include “Branch Beats the White Chimpanzee,” “Nine Yin Skeleton Claw,” and “Lazy Donkey Roll”—a move whose true strength is belied by its apparent softness, she explained.
Home to more than 300 million children, China presents the world’s largest market for such books. According to a report by state news agency Xinhua, around 40,000 children’s titles of all kinds are published in China every year. However, in 2015, over 15,500 titles were imported, and only about 8,000 Chinese works were exported. Still, the nearly 2-to-1 ratio marked the best year for Chinese books in two decades — it was once 48-to-1.
By Nicky Harman, November 16, '17
Today's news: our very own Helen Wang has been recognised on the international stage for her “special contribution” to children’s literature at the 2017 Chen Bochui International Children's Literature Awards in Shanghai. Details in this link.
By David Haysom, November 6, '17
11.11: November 11th, originally a day for singletons in China to either bemoan or celebrate their unattached status, but increasingly an excuse for unbridled consumerism under the auspices of the various online shopping behemoths. At Paper Republic we’re going to be stripping back the commercial self-indulgence and marking the occasion with a new run of four short stories about love, longing, and loneliness. We’re very happy to have Michelle Deeter as our managing editor for the series, which is entitled “Bare Branches” (a literal translation of the Chinese name for the occasion, 光棍节); starting this week, you can look forward to seeing a new story appearing on the site every Thursday for the next month!
By David Haysom, November 5, '17
Though you probably haven’t been hearing too much from Pathlight recently, rest assured we’ve been keeping busy behind the scenes!
More…
The David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship is a unique and generous annual award of £26,000 to enable a fiction writer who wants to write in English about the Far East to spend a year in the UK, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
The Fellowship is named for its sponsor Mr David Wong, a retired Hong Kong businessman who has also been a teacher, journalist and senior civil servant, and is a writer of fiction. The Fellowship was launched in 1997 and the first Fellow appointed from 1st October 1998.
And who was Wang Xiaobo, the author? He was not part of the state writers’ association and hadn’t published fiction before. But after its publication in Taiwan, The Golden Age was soon published in China and became an immediate success. Wang followed it with a torrent of novellas and essays. He was especially popular with college students, who admired his cynicism, irony, humor—and of course the sex.
By Nicky Harman, October 23, '17
Han Dong's first film, One Night at the Wharf, adapted from his novella At the Wharf/在码头, had its first showing at Busan Film Festival last week and got a decent review in Variety. Han Dong directed it, Jia Zhangke was the producer. No news about when it's coming westward yet. More pictures of the screening here.
André Lévy, a renowned translator of Chinese erotica into French, passed away on Oct 3, 2017. His translations included: «Fleur en Fiole d’Or » (金瓶梅)，« Sublime discours de la Chine candide: manuel d’érotologie chinoise» (素女妙論), «La Pérégrination vers l’Ouest» (西遊記) . . .
Da’nanpo was home to Han, Kazakh, Uyghur and Hui families, and we grew up speaking a range of languages. Our mother’s Gansu dialect seemed to come to us mixed in with her breast milk and, from the time we could walk, we eavesdropped on our father chatting in Uyghur with the neighbors. It was one of our favorite pastimes. We learned who had died, whose baby was being named, whose daughter was getting married, which household was slaughtering a sheep to make polo, a Central Asian pilaf traditionally eaten by hand. We followed behind our father whenever he stepped out for süt chay or mutton, like a pack of little dogs trailing behind their leader, hoping for a go at a bone.
David Jacobson’s survey of translations of children’s and YA Literature translated from Chinese, Japanese and Korean - David Jacobson (editorial consultant at Chin Music Press, and author of Are You an Echo?: The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko) has prepared a survey of translations from Chinese, Japanese and Korean in preparation for the 12th IBBY Regional Conference, at the University of Washington, Seattle, 19-22 October 2017. He will be on the panel “Asian American Experiences in Children’s Books” (Panel presentation: David Jacobson, Uma Krishnaswami, Philip Lee, Linda Sue Park).
By Nicky Harman, October 9, '17
Read it here
Jjwxc.net said in an online message to all of its users on Friday that "all topics and posts involving politics and related news" are banned from all sections of the website in accordance with laws and regulations."
The message also said that the site is hiring a number of inspectors to review politically related content on the website.
By Eric Abrahamsen, October 6, '17
Deadline is March 1st, 2018 for the Vermont Studio Center/Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry & Translation Fellowships. Five poets and five translators can travel to Vermont for a four-week residency to work on poetry and poetry translation. See this link for details, and information on past fellows.
By Nicky Harman, October 1, '17
Interactive Book Launch: Happy Dreams, Guanghwa Bookshop. Tuesday, 3 October 2017 from 19:30 to 21:00 (BST), London, United Kingdom
