At the time I got my first book translation project, I just freshly graduated with my master degree in translation and was doing a job that had nothing to do with translation. The anxiety within me grew every day as I found no passion in doing that job but I had no idea what career I wanted to or could do. Then I came across a crowd-sourcing online platform, operated by an e-book publisher, recruiting “amateurs” to translate non-mainstream books that were less known in their origin country. I registered on the platform, passed the test and got my first book to translate. The platform split each book by chapters and assigned to multiple amateurs for crowd-translating. Amateurs don’t get paid for translating. Nevertheless, once the book gets published, translators can continually receive a percentage of sales for each e-book sold. These royalties-like earnings are not much, though. The point was I found passion and tranquility in book translation, and thus set off as a part-time book translator.

It has been six years since I submitted my first book translation, the quality of which was, in fact, kinda terrible. A lot of things changed during the six years. I’ve found the career I want to pursue, got a new job and started cooperating with a bigger publishing house, which focuses on print books instead of e-books. Unlike its e-book specialized counterpart mentioned above, this publisher works in a more traditional way. They have higher requirements on translators as they center around academic and popular science books. Now for each book I translate, the publishing house would pay me a certain amount, which is normally depending on how difficult the content is.

I don’t take translation as the career to pursue, though. There’re a couple of reasons: 1) it would be much less delightful once your hobby becomes your living, 2) you can’t choose which book to translate when it’s your job, 3) essentially it’s a work so tedious that sometimes makes you want to scream, 4) a full-time translator would have to work with tighter deadlines, and 5) you can hardly make a living as the book industry is almost beaten to death by TikTok, Netflix and Steam–at least in the country I’m living in. On the other hand, I have to be grateful to the Internet. Thanks to Google, translating is much easier now. Translation used to be difficult especially when it comes to cultures, as well as specialized terminology and knowledge. Today thousands of millions of people share their culture, experience, knowledge and expertise on the Internet, and you can easily access these valuable resources with a simple click on the “Search” button. The internet saves translators like me from the lack of corpus, references and parallel texts.

By August 2022, I have translated seven books, and I could still happily feel the passions within me. Hope this post could be updated before long, as I can get one more new book to add.

Published (by Aug 2022)

Cover	Published in	Type
	2021	Print
	2019	Ebook
	2018	Ebook
	2017	Ebook
	2017	Ebook

Submitted (by Aug 2022)

Cover (the original)	Translated in	Type
	2021	Print
	2020	Print

All (by Aug 2022)

Genius Weapon

I picked this book at the first sight when seeing publisher’s books-to-translate list of 2021. I’ve long been into stories about artificial intelligent and robots, such as Blade Runner 2049 and BLAME! (one of my favorite manga series, by Tsutomu Nihei). In brief, the book tries to tell its readers: 1) once we human beings apply AI to weapon and war, our end is doomed; 2) we human have already applied AI to weapons as of the time you are reading the book.

	Genius Weapon: Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Weaponry, and the Future of Warfare By Louis A. Del Monte Category: Popular Science > Robotics

Samurai Warrior Operation Manual

Translating this book to Chinese is one of the most special experience I’ve ever had in translation. The book is written in English and Romanized Japanese, as lots of Japanese terms don’t have counterparts in English, such as “fukigaeshi”, “teppo ko gashira”, “kaishakunin”, etc. When translating these Romanized Japanese terms into Chinese, what I was doing was actually transforming them back to hiragana, then to correct kanji, finally to corresponding Chinese characters, if there’s any. Though these Japanese terms have no cultural counterparts in Chinese neither, Chinese readers have no trouble reading the composed characters.

	Samurai Warrior Operation Manual By Chris McNab Category: Culture & History

Bluffer’s Guide To Wine (print/published)

My first step in the print book translation. It got me some headache handling the British humour in this book. It’s not only because British’s well-known dry wit is often difficult for non-Brits to understand, but also because we translators are normally required to add footnotes to culture-bound content. The problem is, once you start explaining a joke, the joke is not funny any more. Anyway, I like British jokes, as well as translating them, as it makes my footnotes adding more meaningful.

	Bluffer’s Guide To Wine By Jonathan Goodall and Harry Eyres Category: Culture

Meat (ebook/published)

Does the translator also feel scary when translating a horror fiction? The answer is yes. This is the second book I worked with my friend. I took the dual number chapters while she took the singular-numbers. She exchanged two chapters with me because those chapters were too scary and gory to her. Some chapters of the book did got me goose bumps and the standing hairs on both arms–exactly what we want from a horror fiction.

The cover used when I was translating the book, now replaced by a new cover	Meat By Michael Bray Category: Horror fiction

Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (ebook/published)

It’s one of those what I call “local novels” that are hard to translate. These novels are appealing to some specific group of readers, while their charm may not come from the story itself, but the “localness”, that is, a mix of local scenes, traditions, people and slangs that you can’t see elsewhere. The other buddy resigned from the project in the midst of translating, leaving me alone struggling with endless British local slangs.

BTW, it’s about two years after my translating when I learnt the book was named after the song of the Beatles.

	Maxwell’s Silver Hammer By Andy Rivers Category: Crime fiction

There Comes a Time (ebook/published)

I worked with other two registered amateurs to translate this science fiction collection composed of 10 stories. If you ask me, the stories are more of fantasy than sci-fi. One of my co-worker is my good friend in university. This has made the teamwork easier as we had worked together in a couple of group projects. Things went quite well, as all three of us like this book and all did our best, despite the disputes now and then we had. After all, what else do you expect from group work?

	There Comes a Time: A Science Fiction Collection By J.J. Green Category: Science fiction

Passionate about Stock Investing (ebook/published)

My first book translation. It’s about 7,900 English words only, which makes it actually more a booklet. I worked with another “amateur”, who was then a business major and intern in a finance company, for this book’s translation. Today I don’t even remember what I’ve translated, but now one thing is sure: the Chinese version of this book is kinda “poor”, which shouldn’t blame the translation quality, but the close-to-impossible localization. With absence of a complex kit of localization strategies, to Chinese readers, the property of this small book (i.e. being a guide) has lost in translation.

	Passionate about Stock Investing: The Quick Guide to Investing in the Stock Market By Alex Uwajeh Category: Business

You can't make money with doing translation. All you get are books which no one reads (but at least cats like them)

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