Paper Republic newsletter 13

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Happy Friday y’all!

This issue comes with a set of brilliant answers to questions we put to three Chinese-Spanish translators, as a continuation of our previous collab with their respective translator collectives. You can find their answers beneath the news. We hope to have more collaboration with Chinese translators and publishers into more languages besides Chinese, so if you fall into one of those categories, feel free to get in touch.

First, let me direct your attention to the great events there are coming up, which for the first time in a long time are all in person. So Londoners and Copenhageners, get to booking.

Oh, and remember news of Han Song’s new novel Hospital, coming out from Amazon Crossing (read our chat with acquiring editor Gabriella Page-Fort here)? We’ve got a look at the striking cover, check it out!

Enjoy your perusing!

Extracts, stories and poems:

News:

Events:

Reviews and releases:

  • A review of Fu Mu 浮木 (Driftwood) by Yang Benfen 杨本芬
  • Compare the free verse poetry of Wang Yin and Yu Xiuhua
  • The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang by Perhat Tursun, tr. Darren Byler & Anonymous, out later this year
  • New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction out now! An anthology of stories edited by Neil Clarke, Xia Jia and Regina Kanyu Wang
  • Check out Louisa Lim’s dedication for their new book about Hong Kong, Indelible City
  • A review of Shuang Xuetao’s Rouge Street, tr. Jeremy Tiang, with another mention here — “As gritty as it is hopeful…”
  • Liu Xinwu’s The Wedding Party tr. Jeremy Tiang rated one of the 4 most incredible Chinese novels in English
  • News of a new Zhang Ling novel, Aftershock, tr. Shelly Bryant

Media:

Now time for the interviews:

Maialen Marin-Lacarta translates Chinese and Sinophone literatures into Spanish and Basque. She has translated works by Shen Congwen, Pema Tseden, Yan Lianke, Mu Shiying, Liu Na’ou, Du Heng, Mo Yan, Yang Lian and, most recently, Liu Ying. She has been awarded the Jokin Zaitegi Basque literary translation award for her translation of Mo Yan’s Shifu, you’ll do Anything for a Laugh with Aiora Jaka. She is also Senior Researcher in the Department of Arts and Humanities at the Open University of Catalonia and teaches in the SISU Translation Research Summer School (Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, Shanghai International Studies University).

1. What is your connection to the Chinese language and to the place or places where the books you translate are written?

I started studying Chinese around twenty years ago, when I enrolled in the Translation Programme of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. I first travelled to China in 2004 for a summer programme and went back in 2006, after graduating, to study in Beijing. When my scholarship ended, I decided to continue studying Chinese literature and moved to Paris to pursue a Master’s and PhD at INALCO, thanks to another scholarship. After graduating and spending two years trying to make a living from translating Chinese literature, I moved to Hong Kong in 2014 and worked at Hong Kong Baptist University until 2020. I have studied Chinese language and literature in every place that I have lived, not just in Beijing and Hong Kong, but also in Barcelona, Sheffield, Bordeaux, Paris, Utrecht and Hendaye. The translation that has had the greatest impact on me in terms of “place” was Shen Congwen’s Biancheng (边城). I was living in the Netherlands when I translated Biancheng and, after I finished the translation, I took six weeks off to travel around China and spent some time in Xiangxi in a kind of literary pilgrimage, exploring the author’s hometown and the places that appear in the novel. Having lived in Hong Kong for six years, I also have a strong connection to that city, which is why I conducted interviews with writers, editors and translators of Hong Kong literature before I left as part of a research project (the HKKH project) funded by the Hong Kong University Grants Committee. I also acted as guest editor of a digital publishing initiative and invited a translator to translate Dorothy Tse’s short story “Head” (see La cabeza).

2. Do you translate any other language(s)? If you do, what differences, if any, do you perceive in the overall process of translating these different languages—in finding the books, in pitching the books, in translating the books, in interacting with the authors, in the way the books are marketed, and in how they are received by critics and readers?

I have only translated one book from another language, Jason Ng’s No City for Slow Men: Hong Kong’s Quirks and Quandaries Laid Bare. There are many differences in translating from Chinese and English. Most of my translations of Chinese literature have been pitched by myself (five out of eight books), whereas Spanish publishers rarely accept pitches for books written in English. So English translators mainly carry out commissioned translations. In terms of the translation process, to put it shortly, Chinese translation involves more rewriting, more creativity and, often, more freedom. I have also had the privilege of having access and being in touch with Chinese authors in many cases (such as Pema Tseden, Yan Lianke, Yang Lian and Liu Ying), which is rare when translating from English. In Spain, the translation fee varies depending on the source language, so Chinese translators are paid more per page than English translators; although in the end I find that translating from English is usually more profitable as it is faster than translating from Chinese (there are other textual factors to take into account, of course, but that’s generally the case). Chinese literature still tends to be marketed for its sociohistorical or documentary value, i.e. to learn about an exotic distant place, its society and its history, whereas the literary value of the works is left aside and overlooked (or, at least, unmentioned). I have written about that issue in my research. However, this has changed in the past decade or so and, with a growing number of small and independent literary presses interested in less translated literatures, I feel that progress has been made and that readers are now starting to read Chinese literature for other reasons.

3. Do you call yourself a full-time (literary) translator? What other jobs or professional roles do you have?

I am not a full-time literary translator; I am also an academic. I am currently Senior Researcher at the Open University of Catalunya and I teach at the SISU Translation Research Summer School held at the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies (Shanghai International Studies University). Both my research and my work as a Chinese literature translator are connected, and my most recent research projects have had an impact in promoting Chinese and Sinophone literatures in translation.

4. How do you come across the works/authors you translate?

Personal encounters and connections have been key in helping me to discover the works that I have translated so far. I met Pema Tseden while living in Hong Kong through a colleague and common friend and that’s how I discovered his work. Although I had read Yan Lianke’s work before, I also met him in Hong Kong through the same friend, and that’s when he asked me to translate Balou tiange (耙耬天歌) into Basque. Yang Lian was looking for a Spanish translator, heard about me through a friend and contacted me to translate some of his poems. In the case of Shen Congwen and other writers of the 1930s (Liu Na’ou, Mu Shiying and Du Heng), I read their work while I was studying modern Chinese literature in Paris and while on a research trip in Taipei, where I took a seminar with Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee. A Spanish publisher recently asked me to write a report of a selection of contemporary Chinese works that have not been translated into English, French or Spanish and, with some help from Yan Lianke, who also teaches creative writing at Renmin University and knows many promising young writers, I selected eighteen works by Chinese contemporary writers. These are all young successful writers whose work has been published in journals such as Dangdai, Shiyue, Shouhuo or Renmin wenxue. Two of them are emerging Hong Kong authors. That’s how the Spanish publisher selected the last novel that I have translated, Liu Ying’s Jiejie (姐姐), whom I have been in touch with thanks to Yan Lianke.

5. Do you see a difference between what from Chinese is being translated into Spanish and what is being translated into English and other languages? Is there an obvious difference in the market?

One big difference with the English-language market is that, unfortunately, we do not have as many literary magazines in Spain that accept translated literature submissions in the form of excerpts or short stories, which is an excellent way of promoting new works and getting to publishers. However, the book market overall is not very different, although more Chinese literature translations get published in French and English than in Spanish. The reason for the homogeneity in the publishing industry is that most Spanish publishers that choose to publish Chinese literature do so only sporadically and after coming across specific literary works in international book fairs thanks to the intervention of literary agents and English and French-language publishers. Therefore, we can find the same trends, such as the success of Chinese sci-fi, for instance, in English, French and Spanish markets. Translations that are pitched by translators also get published in Spain, and as I mentioned before that has been the case of most of my translations, but this is rare and pitched translations are a minority when we look at the overall publications of Chinese literature in Spain. Literary translation is a precarious job, much more so in Spain than in the UK and France from discussions about fees that I have had with colleagues, so there are not many Chinese literature translators actively pitching works to publishers. The Chinese literature market in France, on the other hand, is quite rich and diverse, and there are a few publishers actively engaged in promoting Chinese and Sinophone literature such as L’Asiathèque, Actes Sud, Bleu de Chine, Youfeng and Picquier, among others. Although I haven’t followed French publications closely in the last few years, I think one of the differences with the English-language market is that great attention has been paid to Taiwan in the past decade, with the publication of not only anthologies and novels, but also the Taiwan Fiction collection by L’Asiathèque, under which 9 titles have been issued so far.

6. What’s a work in translation that you’ve loved recently? Or a book/story/author you’ve been aching to work on or are working on and love?

I’d like to mention two translations, one in Spanish and one in English. Last year saw the publication of an unusual literary masterpiece, the Spanish translation of Lin Shu’s Chinese translation of El Quijote by Alicia Relinque. Lin Shu’s translation, published in Shanghai in 1922, was done based on what his collaborator Chen Jialin told him about what he read in Peter A. Motteux’s English rendering and other English translations by Charles Jarvis and Dominick Daly. Relinque’s painstaking translation, including her detailed footnotes, is a way to discover how El Quijote was presented to Chinese readers, a fascinating lens through which to look at early twentieth century Chinese culture, and an opportunity to rediscover the Spanish classic. I strongly recommend it. I am currently reading Dung Kai-cheung’s The History of the Adventures of Vivi and Vera translated by Yau Wai-ping. Although the translator, a colleague of mine, gave me the book before I left Hong Kong, I hadn’t picked it up until now and I find it a fantastic read. Hong Kong was recently my home for six years, and I am enjoying reading this imaginative fantasy that transports me to Hong Kong and its history. I would love to translate Dung Kai-cheung and Dorothy Tse’s works; they are both on my wish list.

7. Can you give us an example of an “untranslatable” word or phrase, and tell us how you brought it into Spanish? Or an example of particular quirks of the Chinese language which are tricky to translate into Spanish, specifically?

If I give you an example of how I translated something challenging into Spanish, then it’s not an “untranslatable” anymore, is it? I feel uncomfortable with the term “untranslatable” because it tends to foreground mystic views about the impossibility of translation and, in the Chinese context, about the exotic and undecipherable nature of the Chinese language. I would rather refer to translation challenges. There are five songs in Shen Congwen’s Biancheng that I found particularly difficult to translate; one of them full of references to gods, immortals and historical and mythical figures. I not only wanted to create songs that could be sung in Spanish, but was also mindful of keeping all the semantics. I’ll quote, as an example, the third song, which is the shortest.

凤滩、茨滩不为凶，
下面还有绕鸡笼；
绕鸡笼也容易下，
青浪滩浪如屋大。

Los del Fénix y el Abrojo
No son los más trabajosos.
Luego viene el Gallinero,
Que también es llevadero.
En cambio, en Ola Negra
Como casas son las peñas.

There are many things I could say about my translation choices above. One is that I translated the names of the river rapids instead of transliterating them. It was for me an obvious choice given the literary nature of the text and the playful tone of the main character who sings this. I was quite happy to find a way to keep the comparison 如屋大 («como casas») and to not give up any meaning for the sake of rhythm and rhyme. This reminds me that rhythm is something that I am quite obsessed with when translating Chinese literature, as I find that many translators do not pay attention to it. The rhythm of a text is often intentional, and I try to recreate it as much as I can.

8. How did your group/collective start and how does it run?

I currently run the DIGITRANS group, built around a project that investigates the role of translation and digital media in the production of knowledge about Chinese literature. The project has an important applied mission: to promote Chinese literature in Spain, which is why we have revamped the China Traducida collective, and are trying to revive it through the creation of a Newsletter, among other actions. There are 9 members in the DIGITRANS group: five Chinese literature experts and translators, three Translation Studies scholars and an intercultural mediator who has worked extensively with the Chinese community in Barcelona. DIGITRANS is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and, although it is a three-year project, the group that we have built around the project is dynamic and motivated, so I am sure we will continue to work together in the future. The project started in December 2021 and since then we have met monthly to plan new initiatives. Some of the actions that we are planning have also been assigned to specific members. Two of the project members are also founding members of China Traducida (Manuel Pavón and Teresa Tejeda), which makes it easier for us to collaborate closely with this collective.

9. Can you say what you get out of it, with any brief examples you want to give?

Although it is a rather new initiative, the DIGITRANS group is enriching for me both as a translator and as a scholar. We all share the desire to promote Chinese and Sinophone literature among Spanish publishers and readers and have the motivation to organise events that can have an impact in society. Until now, I had never been part of a collective with such a strong drive and common objectives. DIGITRANS is also a platform where we can share our concerns with colleagues about translation and research. For example, Belén Cuadra Mora, who is starting her PhD, has her first conference soon, so she’ll be sharing her presentation with us first. It will be a good opportunity for her to get some feedback from us and a chance for us to learn more about her research on linguistic challenges in translating Chinese literature. Both translation and research are often lonely activities, and this group is the perfect platform to share concerns and ambitions. In addition, social impact is turning into an important element of research in all fields, so this group allows us to aim for that and is gratifying because we have many actions in the works for the next two years. Being a small group makes it easier to manage (in comparison to bigger translation associations).

10. What are your ambitions for the group? What do you hope it will look like in a couple years?

Some of the actions that we are planning for the next two years include various competitions in primary and secondary schools in Barcelona to promote Chinese culture and literature among young readers; two 8-hour modules on Sinophone women writers and Chinese sci-fi open to the general public; podcasts about the same topics; a report on contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literature that we will promote at the LIBER book fair, and a conference on Chinese literature translation with the participation of translators, publishers and scholars. I hope that once the project ends in 2025, we will find ways to continue working together to achieve our common goal of promoting Chinese and Sinophone literatures in Spanish.

Belén Cuadra Mora is a lecturer at the University of Granada (Spain), where she is currently pursuing a PhD in Applied Linguistics and Translation. As a professional translator, she has translated works by Lao She, Yan Lianke, Can Xue and Qiu Miaojing. Cuadra’s research focuses on Chinese linguistics and literary translation. In 2021 she was awarded the Marcela de Juan Award for Chinese Literary Translation, for her rendering of Yan Lianke’s Rixi (La muerte del sol).

1. What is your connection to the Chinese language and to the place or places where the books you translate are written? Do you translate any other language(s)? If you do, what differences, if any, do you perceive in the overall process of translating these different languages—in finding the books, in pitching the books, in translating the books, in interacting with the authors, in the way the books are marketed, and in how they are received by critics and readers?

I started studying Chinese in the year 2000. After graduation, I moved to China and Chinese gradually became my main working language as a translator and interpreter. I also translate English texts, and I am a certified translator for English.
The differences between translating from English and translating from Chinese are significant. Even though the process is fairly similar, I believe that the interpreting and rewriting effort that the translator has to make is greater when the languages and cultures involved are more distant, as it happens with Chinese and Spanish. The fact that the cultural context of the original text in Chinese is far less known in Spain than that of a text or novel written in English also raises interesting questions, especially regarding the role of the translator in the way a foreign (and in the case of Chinese, also very unknown) culture is represented. While English-Spanish translation studies have focused on more communicative approaches that promote domestication, I personally think that Chinese-Spanish translation must keep a relatively foreignizing approach that highlights cultural aspects of the original texts.
My experience translating English materials is much more limited, so I cannot really comment on aspects such as pitching or interaction with authors. I can say, though, that most of my experience with editorial translation from Chinese originals has been working with small publishers, who have shown a special interest and dedication throughout the whole process, facilitating contacts with the authors, when this was possible. As for marketing, in my experience, small publishers sometimes make a greater effort to promote Chinese books than bigger publishers, who do not always invest much in a Chinese book that, for them, represents a marginal market anyway.

2. Do you call yourself as a full-time (literary) translator? What other jobs or professional roles do you have?

At the time being I am teaching at the University of Granada, while pursuing a PhD in Chinese Linguistics. During the relatively short periods of time that I worked as a full-time freelance translator, I did other kinds of translations (such as media or legal translations). I have never worked exclusively as a literary translator, although I have considered the option.

3. How do you come across the works/authors you translate?

All my assignments came directly from publishers, sometimes upon the recommendation of a colleague. I only pitched one translation, coincidentally the first one in which I took part: Lao She’s Teahouse, a joint translation published in 2009, under the direction of professor and literary translator Gabriel García-Noblejas.

4. Do you see a difference between what from Chinese is being translated into Spanish and what is being translated into English and other languages? Is there an obvious difference in the market?

I do see a great difference between Chinese-English translations and Chinese-Spanish translations. I have the impression that translations into English tend to promote a higher degree of domestication, which often makes translators and their work invisible. Spanish translations tend to include a higher number of explanatory notes, often at the request of publishers. I have also noticed a higher degree of intervention in the original texts by English publishers, who may delete whole passages from books for editorial or, sometimes, even moral reasons. As far as I know, these practices are less common in Spanish translations.

5. What’s a work in translation that you’ve loved recently? Or a book/story/author you’ve been aching to work on or are working on and love?

I have to say that I feel privileged to have worked with authors and books that I really loved. It is hard, and to a certain extent also unfair, to choose one. Nonetheless, I cannot deny that I developed a very special connection with the works of Yan Lianke, since they amount to a very significant proportion of my translations throughout the last ten years. There is much to be done in Chinese-Spanish translation, and I believe that there are many names waiting to be introduced to a Spanish-speaking audience, especially amongst younger generations of writers.

6. Can you give us an example of an “untranslatable” word or phrase, and tell us how you brought it into English? Or an example of particular quirks of the Chinese language which are tricky to translate into Spanish, specifically?

There are many tricky aspects when you translate a Chinese text into Spanish. I often encounter challenges (whether linguistic, cultural or rhetorical) from the very beginning of a text.

One of the aspects that I find more intriguing is how ambiguity or indeterminacy forces translators to actively intervene on texts. Morphology and syntax are very different in Spanish and Chinese, and this creates a kind of dissonance that interferes in the work of the translator. Take for instance the word 孩子haizi, it can be a boy, a girl, boys or girls (we do not have an equivalent for ‘kid’ in Spanish), meaning that you often need to look for clues in a given text before choosing an accurate form in Spanish. Often those clues can be found (a pronoun, a name…), but sometimes they cannot, and then, as a translator, you need to make assumptions, creating new meanings that were not there originally, at least not in an explicit way. This kind of ambiguity or indeterminacy is persistent in the Chinese language. A 老鼠 laoshu can be rat or a mouse, and the connotations of these two species in Spanish language and culture are very different. The indeterminacy of verb tenses can also be a problem. When you translate a simple phrase such as ‘爹人好’ into Spanish, you must choose a verb tense: My father is a good person… or My father was a good person… Imagine, as it happened in a book that I translated, that a son is telling the story of his father, and that the father dies at the end of the novel. As a translator, I must choose a past tense to comply with the coherence of the argument, but then I am introducing a huge spoiler, maybe in page 10, when the original in Chinese does not hint any of this information. These structural issues can obsess me sometimes. Of course, cultural aspects can also raise many questions, but I believe solutions can be reached, in some way or another. Unlike cultural differences, linguistic differences are not easily explained in a footnote.

I could mention many examples of words or concepts that troubled me in the past, but one that I have to face in every translation, and that I have not yet solved is proper names. Should we translate them? Chinese names often have a meaning, and those meanings might be relevant to the overall story, but is translating them the best option? If so, how? Should we adopt a different approach than we would when translating from, say, English, Italian or French? If we translate one name, why not all? What is the effect that those translations create on the reader?…

I guess one of the things that I find more thrilling in translation is that it poses much more questions than it offers answers. It can be frustrating at times, but that’s what makes it exciting and innovative every time.

7. How did your group/collective start and how does it run?

I am a member of DigiTrans, a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. The project was recently launched by translator and researcher Maialen Marin-Lacarta to study the importance of translation in the shaping of knowledge about Chinese literature, especially in digital media. We just started working, and I must say it is very exciting.

8. Can you say what you get out of it, with any brief examples you want to give?

I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to work with professionals with much more experience than me, and learn from them. Even though all members are academics with different levels of seniority, each person has a different background and can make their own contribution. All of us come from the field of translation, but specialisations vary. For instance, we have one expert in Korean language and culture, one intercultural mediator and one specialist in Sinophone literature and film, to name just a few examples. This mix of disciplines broadens the discussions and allows us to engage in a real multidisciplinary approach that includes linguistic, cultural, sociological or ethnographic considerations, and that ultimately will help to promote Chinese literature and increase the visibility of Chinese translations.
Finally, I would like to add that the group also encourages mutual help in academic issues not necessarily directly related to the project itself. In a way, it also works as a support team for common learning.

9. What are your ambitions for the group? What do you hope it will look like in a couple years?

The group has just been formally launched, so expectations are high. Hopefully, it will consolidate and start producing results very soon. For the time being, we are working on a number of case studies, including one project to promote Chinese literature amongst young readers. Eventually, we hope that the work that we are now carrying out will lead to publications, seminars and new knowledge about Chinese literature in Spanish language.

Manuel Pavón-Belizón translates Chinese literature and non-fiction into Spanish, and coedits the website China Traducida. He has translated works by Fang Fang, Li Er, Lu Xun, Wang Xiaobo, and Zhao Tingyang, among others. He was awarded the 2012 Chinese Literary Translation Prize by the Confucius Institute at the University of Granada, and the prize for Chinese translation at the 1×1 Poetry Translation Contest organised by UNAM and the Translators’ Society of Mexico in 2016. He also teaches modern and contemporary Chinese thought and literature at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and Chinese-Spanish translation at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

1. What is your connection to the Chinese language and to the place or places where the books you translate are written? Do you translate any other language(s)? If you do, what differences, if any, do you perceive in the overall process of translating these different languages—in finding the books, in pitching the books, in translating the books, in interacting with the authors, in the way the books are marketed, and in how they are received by critics and readers?

My early connection with the Chinese language was the fascination for difference. I think this is common among many who decide to study this language. But then you get deeper into it and even end up living in a Chinese-speaking country for a certain period of time, and then your connection to the language turns into a matter of everyday life. It becomes the language you use with your friends, the language of your supermarket, of your workplace, and the language of your intimacy. The fascination remains, of course, but now also together with banality. And this mixed feeling of fascination and banality are also present when you translate a Chinese literary text.

I also translate French and English, but for these languages I do technical stuff mostly, so I don’t have any first-hand experience on literary translation and publishing for these languages. My perception as a reader and observer is that Chinese literature tends to be marketed into wider categories like “Oriental” literature (which in Spain is mostly dominated by Japanese literature), whereas the marketing for French and Anglophone literature tends to be more focused on the specific authors or the stories. I’m under the impression, though, that this might be slightly changing for certain Chinese authors like Yan Lianke and Mo Yan, whose names seem to have become powerhouses on their own.

2. Do you call yourself as a full-time (literary) translator? What other jobs or professional roles do you have?

Not full-time. I am a part-time lecturer of Chinese language, translation, literature, and intellectual history, and do part-time language teaching and office work at Barcelona’s Confucius Institute. Besides, as I said, I am also a technical translator for Chinese, French, and English. By now, I think it is very difficult to be a full-time literary translator with a language combination like Chinese to Spanish. I’m afraid the demand and the flow of literary publications from Chinese into Spanish is not enough to sustain full-time literary translators. At least I don’t know of any translator in that dream situation.

3. How do you come across the works/authors you translate?

From many sources. So far, I normally get to translate authors and works selected by an editor or publisher. In some cases, they may bring some sort of financial support from an organisation or institution (which is often a conditio sine qua non for translating Chinese books into Spanish without risking going bankrupt). When I get to choose (for publishing online, for example), I get recommendations from friends, or check the charts and reviews at Douban or Chinese magazines. But now I think my main source of translation ideas are the public accounts that I follow at WeChat. They publish reviews, interviews with authors… It’s a real mine.

4. Do you see a difference between what from Chinese is being translated into Spanish and what is being translated into English and other languages? Is there an obvious difference in the market?

I don’t see any obvious difference. In fact, for Chinese literature, Spanish-language publishers tend to look a lot at Anglophone and French publishers, so most of what is translated and published is actually “filtered” through English and French (Maialen Marín-Lacarta can explain a lot about this phenomenon). This has to do with the fact that translating and publishing Chinese literature is (was?) a risky business. This may be changing in recent years, especially now that the publication of some titles in Spanish enjoy sponsorship by Chinese publishers and institutions. Yet those titles seem to be promoted equally for different languages and countries. I don’t think there is a specific, localised strategy for the promotion of Chinese literature into different languages or markets (which would be helpful, to some extent).

5. What’s a work in translation that you’ve loved recently? Or a book/story/author you’ve been aching to work on or are working on and love?

I’ve been working on a novel by Li Er, and I love it. The novel is like a compendium of translation difficulties, I feel like everything that makes translation both frustrating and beautiful is in there. Moreover, as a writer, he tells stories that linger in your memory, with all the emotion, the adventure, the humour… But, on top of that, his work is also embedded with an idea, like there is a sort of complex theoretical understream. As far as I have read, I don’t think this is a widespread feature among many Chinese writers today, and Li Er has it.

6. Can you give us an example of an “untranslatable” word or phrase, and tell us how you brought it into English? Or an example of particular quirks of the Chinese language which are tricky to translate into Spanish, specifically?

In general, I find it especially difficult to convey diatopic variations of a language (dialects, etc.). I translated a novel in which one of the characters speaks with a Sichuanese accent. I tried converting that into a non-existent mix of features from different Spanish accents (Extremeño, Andalusian…), but it was not convincing and it didn’t make much sense for a Sichuanese character. In the end, I just translated it without any intended local feature. I didn’t come up with any better solution. Besides, that passage mentioned explicitly that the man had an accent from Sichuan, so it was clear enough.

7. How did your group/collective start and how does it run?

The China Traducida collective was started by my colleagues Tyra Diez and Anna Boladeras in a bar in Beijing behind the Bell Tower sometime in 2011. When they invited me to join later, they had already created this website, China traducida y por Traducir (literally, “China Translated and Untranslated”), with different entries for books, authors, excerpts… Similar to what Paper Republic is. The main purpose was to catalogue the Chinese literary works that had been translated from Chinese into Spanish, and to suggest new works that we considered worthy of translation and publication (thus the name of the website). We have organised some events and participated in conferences on Chinese literature, and try to keep the website updated with new publications and events in Latin America and Spain. We have other jobs, so we don’t run the website professionally and we don’t get a cent from it. I am also a member of Digitrans, a research group on Chinese literature and translation at the Open University of Catalonia, and we publish a monthly newsletter together with China Traducida, with news about everything related to Chinese literature in Spanish-speaking countries.

8. Can you say what you get out of it, with any brief examples you want to give?

Not much in pecuniary terms. As I said, we have professional commitments not related to the website. But we have sometimes got invited to participate in an event, or to collaborate with other initiatives.

9. What are your ambitions for the group? What do you hope it will look like in a couple years?
We just expect to keep channelling information about Chinese literature in Spanish. Now that we work together with DigiTrans, we can reinforce this profile as providers of updated information about what is being published and discussed about Chinese literature. We would also like publishers, translators, and other agents related to Chinese literature in Spanish to see our platform as a tool they can use to get in touch and share ideas. Also, it would be nice to organise some kind of regular events for the promotion of Chinese literature. The diffusion and the demand of Chinese literature in Spanish is still relatively limited, so we have cherished humble expectations so far. But we hope this will change in the coming years and more and more people will get to know and be interested in Chinese literature. Our collaboration with DigiTrans is precisely aimed at that outcome.

Thank you to Belén, Maialen and Manuel!

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