My mission to bring China’s myths to UK (From Echo)

My mission to bring China’s myths to UK

2:09pm Friday 20th October 2006

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Classic mythical tales from China could soon be your child's favourite bedtime reading.

Haiying Zhang hopes that translated versions of these traditional stories will be sitting on children's bookshelves thanks to her newly-launched company, Little Bird Publishing.

Having set the company up three months ago, Haiying aims to translate children's books from Chinese into English so youngsters in the UK can enjoy these age-old stories too.

Young bookworms in China aren't missing out either as she is also translating English fairytales into Chinese for their reading pleasure.

Haiying studied in China, and came to England four years ago to complete her masters in translation at Middlesex University in London before settling in Westcliff.

She says: "While I was studying I had a very strong interest in translating childrens books and translating poetry. These are my major interests.

This passion led to her setting up Little Bird Publishing through which she sells her translated stories.

"English stories are very popular in China, but Chinese books coming into this country is not so popular. It is a market I'd like to fill," she adds.

Haiying works with a number of publishers both here and back in her homeland who want books translated for a new, foreign audience. These books are then published in both English and Chinese or turned into e-books.

However, it's not as easy as reading a story and translating each word as you go along.

"If you translate it word for word it will be very strange, it won't be fluent," explains Haiying, who owned a private language school in China teaching English to Chinese children.

"You have got to rearrange the language. You've got to change the word order sometimes and need another way to say something sometimes."

Writing out the initial draft translation of a story will take Haiying a couple of hours, the time consuming part comes when she goes back over her work making sure grammar and punctuation are first rate.

She adds: "When I translate I have several people who check it before publication to make sure the quality is the best it can be, so I'm confident about what I'm doing."

Haiying says her children's books will also be a benefit to adults who are trying to learn Chinese.

The simple language used gives older students a grounding in the basics and Haiying thinks before long, her mother tongue will be a popular language to learn.

She says: "It's a very difficult language - the pronunciation and the writing people find very difficult to grasp, but with the Chinese economy being powerful and with people doing business and travelling there Chinese and Mandarin are the languages to learn."

Haiying has published a range of books with an older market in mind though.

Translations of traditional Chinese stories can be found in Lotus Pond By the Moonlight and Other Selected Prose by Zhu Ziqing, while classic Chinese poems which date back as far as 206BC are featured in Poetry From The Land of Silk.

Flicking through the poetry book, nearly all the verses featured are only a few lines long. "The Chinese language is very concise," adds Haiying. They use few words, but it's very expressive."

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