Solitary refinements

Contemporary topics

"China is a country that translates literature from many different languages and countries to a high standard, including work from the Americas, Australia, Japan, India, and Europe, and even from countries with a small population like Iceland," says A Yi. "But comparatively, Chinese literature has not been translated as much into other languages."

Yet the identities of these translators remain invisible to readers, as the names of the authors and titles take precedence. Notoriously underpaid, many of today's translators suffer from backache, neck pain and even depression after years of struggle with the written word.

Dan Hansong, a professor of English at Nanjing University, recently said that it would take at least seven years to translate Thomas Pynchon's postmodernist works Against the Day or Mason& Dixon.

"If you have never read Pynchon, you may not know that Pynchon has reached the extremities of the human thought process. His books are not just works of literature, but cover politics, history, chemistry and mathematics within their magnificent, epic structures."

When he agreed to translate Pynchon's Inherent Vice, Dan said he knew his fee would be low but he wanted to demonstrate that he was one of the few people around who could "understand each sentence of that novel".

"Sales were poor - just a few thousand copies. All the others were pulped," he said.

In terms of fees, a translator in the Chinese mainland normally receives 70-100 yuan ($10-14.8) for every 1,000 English words.

But despite the anonymity and low pay, these keen translators are grateful "to be paid for reading and learning" as Zhang puts it, and "eager to share with more people the happiness they gain from reading". As their talent glitters in the text, sooner or later, Zhang says, they will get their due recognition.

In May, Teng Jia-wan met with Dan and Fan at a translators forum in Nanjing, Jiangsu province.

And she says that when she was asked if she wanted to produce the sixth Chinese version of The Lord of the Rings, she set out to create a translation that was worthy of the original.

"For people who speak other languages and are able to read the Chinese version, they will find it just as splendid as any of the other versions," she says.

Many translators share that sense of mission, but He Yujia confesses she is not one of them.

"For me, translation is an enjoyable process. I don't think I am particularly underpaid because my job is not as exhausting as working in finance," she says.

Zhang says that translating great writers is an interesting learning process. She feels a sense of satisfaction when her film reviews appear on Douban, a popular Chinese review site.

Chen may find translation work more onerous but it's a process that provides him with a learning curve and a structured work schedule.

"Compared with writing, in translation, you never find you wake up worrying that you won't be able to write a single word that day. Working for six to eight hours each day, you know that after a few months you will see your translation published. I find that reassuring," he says.