Translated Literature-As close to the original as possible

[deremifri]

Hello everybody,

recently I have been looking for translated literature (chinese - english or vice versa) which is not only faithfully translated but also as literal as possible- retaining as much sentence structure and vocabulary as possible. Can anybody here recommend some books which fit into this category? For example I have read on some website which is dedicated to comparing chinese and viatnamese versions of Harry Potter about frequent mistakes in the mainland version like omitting sentences or wrong words, but I actually thought there weren't too many mistakes like only twenty in the whole book. Does Harry Potter fit the above mentioned criteria? By the way, I do not mind transliterations. Obviously I would like an enjoyable book and the larger the better.

So, I am really loking forward to hearing your opinions.

I hope this question has not been raised and answered before, when I searched the site I only found threads about the mere existence of translated literature or posts about specific books.

[heifeng]

There is this book published by Penguin:

Short Stories in Chinese: A dual-language edition of Chinese stories-featuring many stories appearing in English for the first time.

John Balcom - Editor

[navaburo]

I'm reading the Hobbit in traditional characters. It keeps very close to the original, but not to the point of misappropriating idioms. It's called 魔戒前傳.

Otherwise, look for bilingual aka parallel texts. The editors of those texts usually feel more inclined to keep the translation close to the original.

[deremifri]

Thanks for the suggestions.

As I still need to use (@ navaburo: I know you said that at a beginning level they can be confusing) an annotation tool, I would prefer if the texts were online, but I haven't found any parallet texts yet for which the audio is available.

I assume the traditional character edition is a different translation than the mainland version. Is this correct?

Anyway, after looking around the web I have heard that chinese novels translated into English by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang are supposed to be very faithful and good. Especially their translation of a short story collection by A Cheng. Audio is also available on the web.

[Lu]

Anyway, after looking around the web I have heard that chinese novels translated into English by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang are supposed to be very faithful and good.

I was going to recommend them, but you already found them. Imo their translations are not very good, they pretty much kill any individual style a writer or work may have had, but they are very faithful, so for learning purposes their work is a great choice. They've translated a lot of literary classics, so you have plenty of choice.

[roddy]

The Balcom book Heifeng mentions above has been translated, according to the intro, "attempting to create a readable English version that could be used as a crib for advanced language students"