Liu Qing, guest of the 2021 Fu Lei Translation Award: Good translators make us believe that we are all human beings

Reporter | Lin Zi people

Edit | Yellow Moon

The second press conference of the 13th Fu Lei Translation and Publication Award was held yesterday at the "Villa Bassai", the official residence of the French Consul General in Shanghai. A total of 47 entries were received for this year's Fu Lei Prize, including 35 in the social science category and 12 in the literature category, and the 10 shortlisted works include the anthropological work "Return to the Homeland" by sociologist and philosopher Didier Eripon, the short story collection "Ostend's Dreamer" by Eric Emmanuel Schmitt, and the "Psychoanalytic Private Dictionary" by Elisabeth Ludinescu. In his welcome speech, Benoît Guidée, Consul General of France in Shanghai, pointed out that books have always been one of the important media in cultural exchanges between China and France, and in recent years, China has been the largest partner of the French publishing industry, and Chinese has always been the largest language for the transfer of French book copyrights.

This year's Fu Lei Award is being held in Shanghai after 2015, and more importantly, the award ceremony on November 20 will be held in Zhoupu Town, Pudong New Area, where Fu Lei was born and raised. According to Peng Weifen, deputy director of the Propaganda Department of the Shanghai Pudong New Area Cpc Committee, as a cultural town with a thousand-year history, Zhoupu Town has been committed to spreading Fu Lei culture in recent years, and has established a middle, primary and young education system named after Fu Lei. The only Fu Lei theme library in China is also located here, which contains the most complete Fu Lei related literature in the country. The Fu Lei Library is also the venue for this year's Fu Lei Award Ceremony.

This year's jury will be chaired by guillaume Olive, a writer and expert in classical Chinese poetry, and the two winners of the last Fu Lei Award, Ning Chunyan and Wang Wei, will also participate in the final evaluation, as well as two special guests from China, namely writer Sun Ganlu and Liu Qing, zijiang distinguished professor and political science scholar of East China Normal University.

Ning Chunyan, Sun Ganlu and Liu Qing attended yesterday's press conference and held a dialogue with Dong Qiang, chairman of the Fu Lei Translation and Publication Award Organizing Committee, on "what is translation". Ning Chunyan won the 2020 Fu Lei Translation and Publication Award in the Literature Category for her translation of "Lonely in the Cotton Field", which is the first time that the Fu Lei Award has been awarded to a dramatic translation. Ning Chunyan said that as a practitioner of the theater industry, she has a special advantage in translating dramatic works. She noted that the usual theatrical translations are very literary, but in the actual troupe rehearsals, the director often needs to "re-translate" with the actors to convert the written language into the stage language. Therefore, when translating theatrical works, she pays special attention to two points, one is to respect the original text, and the other is to make the translation catchy.

As a political scientist trained in the United States, Liu Qing said that French thinkers (such as Foucault and Derrida) had an important influence not only on the entire Anglo-American community, but also on himself. Starting from his own reading and English translation experience, he believes that the translation is obscure and difficult to understand is most likely the translator's fault, but the works of French writers are probably an exception, such as this year's shortlisted work "The Book of Problems", which is both a literary work and a long philosophical speculation, "obscure really dare not determine whether it is the translator's problem." In Liu Qing's view, the richness of French literary and academic thought is particularly fascinating, and the excellent translators let us see how the translation can convey the intentions of the original author to us in a wonderful and precise way, "A good translator makes us believe that we are all human beings." ”

The two guests, like the permanent judges, have the right to vote in the final judging. Sun Ganlu told Interface Culture (ID: Booksandfun) that there are many important translators in the jury who are able to professionally check the accuracy and artistic achievement of the translation of the shortlisted works. Personally, he pays special attention to the relationship between the final winning works of this year's Fu Lei Prize in the context of French literature and the translation of French literary Chinese. In addition, given that most of the current translations are recent French works, we can also observe the changes in the French intellectual and literary circles today, the issues of concern, and the special meaning of the time point at which the works were translated into China.