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'Lord' translator acts out his own fantasy
Some might think what he has done is crazy, but he thinks it is right to share his good fortune with the whole of society
Xu Jitao
Shanghai_Delta
page04 2006-3-21
"There are a lot of fantasy stories in the traditional culture of China. But few writers pay attention to them."
LUCIFER CHU
Chinese translator of "The Lord of the Rings"
"I always think that all the money I made is borrowed from society. What I am doing now is just paying back my debt in a proper way," said Lucifer Chu, the Chinese translator of "The Lord of the Rings."
The 31-year-old Chu has earned more than NT$20 million (US$615,000) from his translation, but now he is worried that his money will soon run out because he has devoted himself to another project - the Opensource OpenCourseWare Prototype System (OOPS). In 2000 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched a project called MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW). The university announced it was dedicated to providing free and open educational resources for faculty, students and self-learners around the world.
Soon afterwards, many top universities around the world, such as Cambridge University and Tokyo University, launched similar projects. Chu's OOPS project is designed to translate all such resources into Chinese and bring them to Chinese-speaking students.
"Some people think I'm crazy," Chu said. Certainly, some think that what he has done is crazy.
Engineering to PR
Chu was graduated from the Electrical Engineering Department of National Central University in Taiwan and was prepared to take the post-graduate entrance test. But translating "Dragonlance Chronicle" cost him his opportunity to enter a graduate school.
Chu was not bothered by the failure for long. After receiving his bachelor's degree, he found a job at Ogilvy Company. "Most people were surprised when I decided to go to Ogilvy. As an electrical engineering graduate, I was supposed to become an engineer. I was clear that if I continued to work in electrical engineering, I would not be the best engineer. But in the PR industry, because most people have little knowledge of electrical engineering and do not know how to talk with engineers, I thought maybe I would succeed with my knowledge," Chu said.
Chu started working at Ogilvy in 1999. Of all those recruited by the company at that time, he was paid the highest salary.
"I talked with my boss several times. He was convinced that I was the most outstanding employee and deserved the highest salary," he said.
At Ogilvy, Chu proved his excellence. With his knowledge of electrical engineering, he handled many cases that his colleagues could not deal with.
Dedication to fantasy
But Chu stayed only eight months.
"When a person can predict what his boss will do all the time, there is no necessity for that person to stay in that company," he said. According to Chu, during his last days at Ogilvy, he was like a bird in a glass cage.
As a hardcore fan of fantasy fiction, Chu started to read the "Dungeon and Dragons" series and many other fantasy stories. He also played computer games which were related to fantasy.
"I tried to find out the meaning of every word in both stories and games when I was a child. Gradually, my English improved," he recalled.
When he was a middle-school student, he wrote columns about computer games for several magazines devoted to that genre. Before he graduated from the university, he translated the "Dragonlance Chronicle" trilogy. His work earned him a reputation and computer games companies started asking him to translate their games for them.
When he decided to leave Ogilvy, he had found another task that attracted him - translating "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
"Before I translated the books, they had already been translated in Taiwan. But few people had read them because the translation was not good. I found a publishing house and told the chief that I could translate the books again and promised him that the books would be accepted by many people," Chu said.
The chief was convinced by all the books Chu translated so he asked Chu not only to do the translations but also to do the promotional campaign for the books.
Chu began work on the trilogy in March, 2000 and continued for eight months.
"It was very difficult to translate the books in eight months, but I succeeded," Chu said.
While he was working and in the days after he finished, Chu had to go to bookstores to convince the owners that "The Lord of the Rings" would be very popular before the films were released. He received support from other fans of fantasy stories.
"I did not know most of them, but they introduced my books to their friends and classmates. When I was translating the books, I often asked the fans for help over the Internet," Chu said.
To share with society
"But I realized the money was not really mine," he said. He began looking for a way to share his good fortune with others.
In 2002, Chu founded the Fantasy Foundation and funded it with 1 million yuan (US$123,000). Every year, the foundation sponsors a competition to encourage writers to submit fantasy stories and other related works, such as pictures they have created.
"I admit that I love 'The Lord of the Rings,' 'Dungeons and Dragons' and even 'Harry Potter.' But mostly I wonder why there are no writers similar to Tolkien or Rowling in China. There are a lot of fantasy stories in the traditional culture of China. But few writers pay attention to them," Chu said.
He hopes to encourage more Chinese writers to create fantasy stories through his foundation.
But the foundation is only a small part of Chu's life. At the end of 2003, he read an article about MIT's OpenCourseWare project. He logged on to the database of OCW and found it was a treasure for people who wanted to learn.
"But at the same time, I found that there were no Chinese translations of those resources - it meant that most Chinese students had to spend a lot of time learning English before they could use the resources. I wrote to MIT and said that I would translate everything into Chinese," Chu said.
Supported with money he earned from the translation of "The Lord of the Rings," Chu again immersed himself in translation. "But I'm not an expert in many fields, so I invited many volunteers to join my project," he said. He had become the chief editor of a publishing house after he completed his work on "Rings" but quit in 2004 to devote himself to the OOPS project.
"I think I have found a proper way to pay back society for what I owed it," Chu said.
More than 1,600 volunteers have joined Chu's project. They are encouraged to select whatever coursebooks and other materials they know best how to translate. When they are finished, the material is uploaded to a website set up by Chu and his fantasycolleagues. Anyone who wants can download material from the website without any restrictions, as long as they are not for business use.
"But we still have many difficulties. The biggest one is that we don't have enough money. All the money I earned will be spent soon, so I will have to travel around to ask for sponsorship," Chu said.
"People have said that, in some sense, I'm not a good person because I did not give my mother any money. All the money I earned was spent on the foundation and the project. But I do not regret that because it was what I dreamed of doing, it could help many people and even change the world," he said. |
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