Bilingual Chinese-English parallel edition books

[Bryan]

Does anyone out there know of a good source for bilingual books with Chinese (preferably simplified) on one page and English on the other? Other than translations of the Bible, I haven't seen much that's not in traditional characters. Believe it or not, Amazon.com (U.S.) seems to have several editions editions of fiction and short stories [follow this link to amazon] but they all appear to use traditional characters. If you 'Search Inside this Book' and view the Copyright page of these books, you will see that many of them are recent editions put out by Chinese University of Hong Kong which are "remakes" of earlier Simplified editions that were put out in 1999 by Chinese Literature Press.

Does anyone have any recommendations on where to find good parallel bilingual texts? Furthermore, any specific books recommendations with an approximate gauge of accompanying difficulty level?

Thanks,

Bryan

[gougou]

Dangdang has quite a large selection (3257 for this search query alone). Shipping costs are 50% of your total order.

[Bryan]

Thanks, gougou. I will be sure to check them out.

[Pravit]

Foreign Languages Press （外文出版社) publishes some excellent bilingual versions (simplified Chinese) of classic works of Lu Xun, Lao She and other famous authors, but they can be a bit hard to find - I found some in a bookshop in Wudaokou last year but have not found them since. They have a yellow cover and a small portrait of the author in front. I remember Amazon sells them, although they might not be in stock. Bilingual versions of famous Western literature seems to be rather abundant here too.

[Bryan]

Thanks, Pravit. I was able to find exactly what you mentioned on amazon.cn

[zozzen]

i saw a lot classic novels edited in parallel bilingual way and they're sold for only one or two bucks in a big bookshop in Shenzhen. Perhaps you can start a thread and ask someone to help buying these books.

[Altair]

Hi Bryan,

FYI, I got number 2 and number 9 from this list of Lu Xun's works on Amazon, and they were both in simplified.

[trien27]

Look for English-Chinese: some Romance novels that has been translated into Chinese from English or some Shakespearean works are all I know.

Hey, Bryan. That's also my name.

[Bryan]

Zozzen, Altair and trien27, thanks for the sugguestions.

Altair, thanks for the great link. I'm guessing that would be over my head though since I'm lower-intermediate at best and from what I hear, Lu Xun is more difficult than some others. Would you agree?

[Altair]

Altair, thanks for the great link. I'm guessing that would be over my head though since I'm lower-intermediate at best and from what I hear, Lu Xun is more difficult than some others. Would you agree?

I might agree, but I actually just proposed using 狂人日记 as a study text on the forum. I am currently using Wenlin to read through Lu Xun's 呐喊 and bought the book to get a translation to check myself and help with more difficult constructions. For me this has been a great help.

What might be difficult is that Lu Xun is referring to a society that is quite removed from what is familiar to most Westerners and has to use some terms that are probably no longer used outside of historical contexts. Aside from this, I have not found it too difficult. If, however, you have no computer aid for vocabulary and must look up every unfamiliar character and every new word, I would try something else first.

[Bryan]

Thanks for the insights, Altair. Found your other post. Will meet you over there...

[atitarev]

Try:

"Everyday Chinese" (每日汉语) series, ISBN 0-8351-1396-5 (Selected Prose Readings) and other books by Zhong Qin (钟梫). The 1st volume was called "60 Fables and Anecdotes".

Bilingual books with Pinyin and vocabulary. They are out of print, unfortunately.