Writing in One Voice: Thoughts and Memories on Co-Translating Jin Yong’s Legends of the Condor Heroes

Abstract

AbstractTales of martial heroes, or wuxia, have been a staple in Chinese storytelling and entertainment for centuries, and one of the most influential modern exponents is Jin Yong (1924–2018). His fifteen novels, written in serialised form between the 1950s and the 1970s, have sold in the hundred millions and are constantly reinvented in different media. His works were translated into Asian languages as early as the 1960s, but they were often considered to be too steeped in traditional Chinese culture and history for readers further afield. It was not until the mid-1990s and early 2000s that his stories made their debut in European languages (English and French). This essay chronicles how the translator, Gigi Chang, came to join the translation team of Jin Yong’s most frequently reimagined title, Legends of the Condor Heroes (MacLehose Press, 2018–2021), and how she worked closely with Anna Holmwood, the translator who initiated the project, to calibrate her interpretation of the source text and her writing to create a co-translation in English that is unified in tone and voice. It also describes the journey the translation team took to develop and refine their approach, drawing examples from the published translation to discuss how the translators negotiated the expectations of different types of readers—ranging from those completely new to the genre to those familiar with the original story; how they shaped the source content to recreate the exhilarating reading experience commonly reported by Chinese readers in translation; how they referenced each other’s work to ensure continuity in character development between volumes; and how they took inspiration from screen culture and cinematic techniques to bring the extensive action scenes in the novel alive for readers in a new language.