Q: How did you collaborate on this translation?

A: I did the first draft and delivered it to Howard. He checked my work against the Chinese and made changes, cutting here and adding there. I checked the resulting second draft line by line against the original Chinese, and passed the third draft back to Howard, who read it without looking at the Chinese. At this point he was only concentrating on polishing the English. After Howard finished with the fourth draft we delivered the translation to the publisher, whose editors marked it up. We then made further changes based on their comments, although we didn't accept all their suggestions. Our fifth draft then went to the typesetter, and when the galleys came back we checked them over and made changes, but we could hardly change anything at that point because the typesetting was already finished. We changed perhaps a word or two.

Q: What are the difficulties of translation? How do you strike a balance between staying faithful to the original and writing good English?

A: There are lots of problems. One of them is how to communicate the spirit of the original text in fluid English. It's not so hard to get the meaning, but we believe there is more to translation than that. Chinese characters frequently have more than one nuance, but you can't always find a corresponding English word that covers all the same nuances appropriately. You sometimes have to expand on the original, but you can't afford to get too verbose, either.

Also, a Chinese text will often include cultural references that the translator's audience may not be familiar with, and it's a big challenge to get the point across in such cases. We make it a principle not to clutter our translations with footnotes. Instead, we try to work the cultural references into the translation, but that's quite difficult because we don't like to get too wordy.

Take the term "peach garden oath," for example. Every Chinese school child knows that this was an oath of brotherhood taken by three brave-hearted men in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a semi-historical epic set in the third century. Some translators explain this background with a footnote, but we prefer to inject the information into the translation in a concise way.

In order to stay faithful to the original while writing good English, our basic principle is to "reenact" the scene in our minds, only in English. With dialogue, for example, we try to imagine what each character would have said if they had been having the same conversation in English.

There are two completely different ways of looking at what the translator ought to be trying to accomplish. Some people feel that the translator should transport the reader into the linguistic world of the original and force the reader to get used to the original language. Others, however, feel that the translator should do just the opposite, and re-create the original in language that is familiar to the reader. We generally hold more to the latter view. The audience for English translations of Chinese literature is quite small, and we don't feel like we should be scaring any readers away.

Q: What do you enjoy about translation? When you look at a completed translation, how does it make you feel?

A: Part of the fun is in dealing with the challenges that the original throws at you. It's impossible to describe the feeling of accomplishment that you get when you finally finish off a difficult sentence after racking your brains over it for a long time. It's really fun when you're able to translate something into elegant English that accurately conveys what is being expressed in the Chinese. Of course, you have to enjoy what you're translating, otherwise none of what I've said applies.

With translation, there's no limit to the improvements you can make. We set high standards for ourselves, but you can keep editing and revising forever without getting a completely flawless translation. A finished translation can only be the best the translator was able to do in the time available. It's hard to be completely satisfied.

Q: Do you feel that anything is necessarily lost in the process of translation? Take Notes of a Desolate Man, for example. Do you think that your translation expresses with the same forcefulness the feelings that the author was trying to convey?

A: There are bound to be differences between a translation and the original work, but that doesn't necessarily mean the translation is not as good, nor does it necessarily constitute a problem. Obviously when you switch cultures and languages, the translation is going to be different from the original. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that Gregory Rabassa's English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude was better than the Spanish original. As we translated Notes of a Desolate Man we tried hard to capture the feel and spirit of the original work. We reworked many parts of our translation quite a number of times, and we consulted often with the author to avoid mistakes. I don't dare claim the translation is perfect, but there are no egregious errors.

Q: What is your opinion of Notes of a Desolate Man? Did it win a prize because of the quality of the translation? Or did that have more to do with the original? Did the judges check the translations carefully against the original works?

A: The original work itself is a highly ambitious novel, and a very successful one too. There is a sort of "sympathetic resonance" in this book between the uncertain social status of homosexuals and the uncertain international status of Taiwan itself. This resonance carries the significance of the novel to a higher level. Notes of a Desolate Man goes beyond mere description of the love lives of homosexuals. While firmly rooted in Taiwan's society, it also speaks to people of other cultures. It has a special local flavor, but it also touches on themes of universal relevance.

This actually made the novel especially difficult to translate. The author draws upon the philosophy, culture, and history of both East and West. We did a lot of research in connection with the translation. Some of the research was to nail down little details, such as the names of movies and directors in places like Japan and Italy. Some of it was to get an understanding of broad conceptual issues, as when we read English translations of works by Levi-Strauss. Also, the author consciously created a special writing style that forced us to really think hard about how to recreate the distinctive flavor of the original without making our translation stilted and difficult to understand.

The translation prize you mentioned is the National Translation Award of the American Association of Literary Translators. All the entries went through two preliminary rounds of judging before a short list of finalists emerged. The judges were university professors and authors who do translations themselves, but not all the judges necessarily understood the original languages of the translations they were judging.

We were told that in the two preliminary rounds this year there was only one judge on the panel who understood Chinese, and none on the panel judging the finalist entries. One of their principles was that the original novel itself had to be well written and have literary importance, but we're talking about a translation prize, after all, so the most important criteria in the judging were the quality of the translator's writing and the difficulty of the original. We felt that the difficulty of translating Notes of a Desolate Man was apparent in the translation itself.

Of course we were happy to win the prize, and for more than one reason. First, translation is a very thankless undertaking. You've got to serve two masters, so to speak-the original text and the translated text. But most people think rather lowly of translation and translators. Some people think that translation is nothing more than a straightforward switching between different linguistic codes, and that anyone who knows a foreign language can do it. Another problem is that when a translation is well done people are apt to credit it to the quality of the original, while a poor translation is naturally blamed on the translator. The translator takes a beating left and right.

Second, this is the first time that the American Association of Literary Translators has ever awarded a prize for an English translation of a contemporary Chinese work. The Association once awarded a prize for a collection of classical Chinese works, but the collection included many poems that had already been translated before. Our prize represents recognition by our fellow translators of the quality of our translation, to be sure, but the significance goes beyond that. More importantly, the prize shows that the translation community in the US is gradually beginning to understand the difficulties involved in translating contemporary Chinese literature. Because languages like French or Italian are similar to English in many ways, they are much easier to translate than Chinese. This is also the first time that the prize has ever gone to an English translation of a novel from Taiwan, and we are very pleased on that score too.