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Translators’ Note 

 

Reasons for translating Wu’s work

 

The book My Heart, Thy Window is the second collection of prose written by a renowned Hong Kong writer, Wu Yin-ching. The book consists of twenty-two stories in total, exploring the theme of love, family, friendship, and personal growth. The three stories, which are 'Her Warmth', 'Ten years', and 'A City without Tranquility', are selected and translated into English owing to the similar ideas conveyed in the three stories: always treasuring our beloved ones and reflecting on our life experiences. We hope that our translation can remind readers of the beautiful things and people they have met, thereby cherishing every moment in life. Moreover, we would like to take this opportunity to promote Hong Kong literature and show the beauty of Hong Kong culture to more people around the world.  

 

Challenges & solutions

 

The differences between Chinese and English increased the difficulty of translating the source text. We have to analyse the content carefully and identify what tense we should use for English because there is no such concept in Chinese so we can use the correct tense since sometimes the stories are about memories while something happened in the past and continue at present. 

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The second challenge is to translate Chinese names because names can reveal and highlight the relationship between their names. We decide to use Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanization to translate the Chinese name into English and put the Chinese name in brackets after the English names.

 

Expectations & feelings 

 

Relationships are complicated but interesting for one to write and read. No matter which language you were born with, you might connect with the most important person deep in your heart in 'Her Warmth', treasuring the loveliness of your 'distant' friendship in 'Ten Years', or being encouraged to achieve your truest self in 'A City Without Tranquility'.  

  

Despite its complexity, relationships meanwhile support us, just like what has been demonstrated in our translation project. Six of us in a team are responsible for translating designated parts of Wu’s three proses with proofreading and editing. We enjoyed translating them. We would like to thank Dr Todorova Marija for giving us such a precious opportunity to learn from others’ strengths, including those hard and soft, to which we can be involved in promoting Hong Kong literature through collaborative translation.   

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As both translators and editors, we try to make ourselves visible. We inserted photos, some of them taken by ourselves, in the stories to make the web pages more attractive and interesting. We also quoted short sentences from each story to hint at the theme of the content. The quotations were put before the story title. Moreover, a question is also raised for each story and is placed on top to interact with the readers.