Earlier this year, I was in a meeting with a group of English-Chinese translators, all of whom voiced concerns about the quality of recent literary translations into Chinese. One translator said he doesn't even bother to read translations from the eighties onward because they compare so poorly to earlier translations (from the twenties and thirties, for example).

The main culprits seem to be low translation wages and impossible deadlines set by local publishers. Nearly all of the Chinese translators in our meeting complained that they were unable to do justice to their translations in the time alloted by publishers. Books that should take between 4-6 months to properly translate and research are being completed in 1-2 months; this results in clunky and often unreadable translations that sell poorly and disappoint readers.

Although the field of Chinese-English translation suffers from some of the same problems (low wages, poor editing at small academic presses, etc.), foreign publisher deadlines are much more realistic. I spent 7 months translating Guo Xiaolu's 100,000-character novel Village of Stone. Howard Goldblatt spent one year on his painstaking translation of Jiang Rong's much longer novel Wolf Totem. It's hard to imagine a Chinese translator being allowed to spend 6 months, much less a year, translating an English, French, Russian or Japanese novel of similar length.

The situation is even worse in the world of film. Although Chinese viewers have access to an incredible variety of pirated films - from the latest Hollywood blockbusters to classics by Fellini, Tarkovsky, Almodovar and Kurosawa - the Chinese subtitles are so poor that they obscure the original meaning. It's not just that they are rendered into translationese or riddled with mistakes; sometimes the subtitles are made-up, re-scripted or cribbed from other films. When watching foreign films with Chinese friends, I realize that we are watching two entirely different films.

May I say that China is not just lost in transition, but also definitely lost in translation.

What an outrageous and misleading first line. The man has only been accused of bad translation. If I was the professor I would be consulting a lawyer.

No jo, he really has been accused of literal rape; Joel's only just translated the fact (accurately).

Most Chinese to English translation around the world is done by native Chinese. They do their best, but this breach of the cardinal rule of translation, work INTO your mother tongue, means that quality ranges from barely acceptable to flatly appalling, across the board, from the China Daily's laughable headline-writing to arcane chemical patents. As said, the Chinese working into English do their best, but there is a chronic shortage of native-English writers able to do this work and for those who do master the skill, which takes five-ten years, pay is a joke. As a result, the only non-Chinese who get into C>E translation are sinophiles working largely out of personal interest. Until the Chinese learn to (a) recognise and (b) appreciate good translation into English and its importance, this situation will go on and everything written in English coming out of China will make its originator look stupid and amateurish (click on almost any Chinese company's bilingual website).