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Miranda Priestly
Miranda, hi. Pull yourself together. We have work to do. And by we, I mean you.
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Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci are back.
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James Trapp
Auntie.on May 1st.
- [00:14]
Miranda Priestly
Look what T.J. maxx dragged in.
- [00:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I am the new features editor at Benway.
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Miranda Priestly
No, you are not.
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Icons reign forever.
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Miranda Priestly
Cheers.
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James Trapp
Wait, wait.
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Miranda Priestly
Hope to God that's not what you're wearing to the dinner. That's all.
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Get tickets now. The Devil Wears Prada 2 May 1st. Directed by David Frankel. Radio PG 13 may be inappropriate for children under 13.
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Hey, NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network audience survey, and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries and institutions we partner with. When we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing. If you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [01:45]
James Trapp
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with James Trapp, who is the translator of a book just out in English in 2025 from Sinoist Press titled Property of the People, originally written in Chinese by Joe Mei Sen. James is here to tell us about the book and of course, the process of translating it, which is always a very interesting endeavor. Now, this book, I don't want to give too much away at this, but it is fiction. We'll talk a little bit about that, I think, and takes us into a world in which a company is trying to figure out. Figure itself out, I suppose. So for anyone who's kind of familiar with corporate politics, there will be a lot that is very familiar here. There's also obviously kind of national politics involved as well and some personal stories interwoven too. So a whole bunch of things for us to discuss in terms of the story itself and the process of getting it to English readers. James, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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James Trapp
Pleasure to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off please by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us how you became professional translator? Yes.
- [03:07]
James Trapp
Okay. So yes, my name is James Trapp. My Chinese name is Pu Huajie and I am currently pretty much a full time freelance translator of principally of contemporary Chinese literature, Chinese novels, though I also branch out into historical, archaeological and occasionally somewhat unwillingly political material, generally whatever comes my way. I have a long background in Chinese studies in that I took my degree In Chinese, oh, 50 years ago, not quite. I graduated in 1981 from the school of Oriental and African Studies and subsequently I've also worked in Chinese education and in the, at the British Museum. But as I say, now I'm a full time, full time translator.
- [04:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And how then did you get involved with this particular project? What made you say yes to it?
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James Trapp
Well, I don't know if you're familiar with Horace Rumpole, the character, the barrister created by John Mortimer. He describes the work barristers as being like taxi cabs applying for hire. You take the next fare that comes along. And to a certain extent that's true of me. If someone in this case, particularly Sinoist books, who I've worked a lot with, asked me to do something, I will generally say yes, which has worked out fine for me so far because they haven't given me anything that bored me. So I stick to that principle. I'm most interested in translating and in the process of translating and quite often the subject matter is secondary to the process.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I think we're going to talk about the process and the subject matter because I think both of those elements are definitely intriguing, perhaps on subject matter. First, can you give us a brief summary of the book from your perspective? Having been so close to it, what do you think are sort of the main messages of. Of it?
- [05:18]
James Trapp
Well, there's quite a lot of history too. Zhou Mason is a very well known writer in China, very little known over here. Only one other, I think of his works has been translated and that's actually what you could call the prequel to this. In fact, he wrote the book that's translated as in the Name of the People first and then this one, Property of the People followed. Both were very successful. The first one actually received a certain amount of official support because the subject matter of both is corruption, both political and commercial corruption. And they came to a time when an anti corruption, major anti corruption drive was being launched by Xi Jinping. So the first one, the in the Name of the People, deals more with corruption at high level, high level political corruption, principally. Whereas Property of the People centers on corruption in one particular town in North China and within one particular company that is part of a major state owned conglomerate. And it's a labyrinthine novel, I have to say. It has a huge cast and there are many different plots and subplots going on, but principally it charts the downfall of one man who has come to control effectively this conglomerate and what happens to his subordinates and his connections. It's a novel about a very Chinese concept, the concept of guanxi, Guanxi, which is almost untranslatable because it has so many nuances to it. It basically means connections and it's informal connections. It's what makes business in China work. It's relationships between people within companies, between people in different companies, in different families, so on. It's a complicated network of responsibilities and obligations which are never actually really defined, but everyone knows that they're there. And it's been a feature of Chinese life for centuries. And people. It goes back, if you can say, it goes back to Confucian principles of rights and responsibilities, but it's become much less esoteric than that. It's an intensely practical thing. Your Guanxi, your connections. And this novel is effectively about how this network works within this company and within this town, and where it succeeds and where ultimately it fails. It's one of a series of novels I've actually now translated, I think, three novels about corruption in different settings. So it's clearly, it's a very popular, it's a frequent theme in contemporary writing. It's now acknowledged how much corruption there has been and is still fueling commerce and politics. But the same is true across the world. But in China there has been, for the last 15 years or so, there has been a particular emphasis on trying to crack down on it, trying to control it. This is one of the major novels that looks at it in great detail. And it actually, it's spawned both novels in fact spawn very successful television series. And this one was also made into a film. It wasn't the film and the TV series aren't called Property of the People. They're called, what's it, A torway breakthrough. And they do. They diverge quite a lot from the novel in details, but the overall tenor of them is the same. You can find them, I think, both on. Certainly you can find episodes of the TV series on YouTube if you search for it.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Fascinating indeed. Then to hear about kind of these themes and the fact that they're so central not just to this book but to lots of other novels in modern China, how then do you think those messages kind of might come across? I mean, you mentioned, right, that corruption is not just something in China, it's a global issue, but that it's also a big thing in China. So do you think the messages of the book might be different for people who read it in Chinese versus read it in English?
- [10:23]
James Trapp
Yes. No, he says helpfully. No, in that they are. Well, yeah, I mean, they will be familiar, the concepts will be familiar, backhanders, crooked deals, massaging figures and so on. I think what will surprise non Chinese readers and readers who aren't actually that familiar with contemporary China is the scale, sometimes the openness, although that is changing, and the vast amounts of money that are involved. Because when you're talking about China and finance, you multiply everything by several hundred times. So the essence will be familiar, but the intricate detail and sometimes the motivations of the people, particularly driven by these guanxi by connections, will seem initially rather strange. But you kind of adjust to that once you understand who everybody is, which if you ever do. I have to say, it's quite confusing in the cast of characters, especially if you're not used to Chinese names, but you pick out the main ones fairly quickly. Interestingly, when I read made me think first of Dickens in the complexity of the plotting and the characters, first of Dickens. And then I corrected myself and I thought, actually it's most like in Western literature, most like Balzac, who was my favorite French author back from school days and who created his own world in his series the Comedy youy Met. And I recently found out that the author Jo Mei sun, is actually a great admirer of Balzac, and so I suspect that's influenced the structure and plotting of certainly of this novel. He's also on record of saying that this is the one novel he really wanted to write, so I think it probably brings together all sorts of his fascinations.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I can kind of see that, actually. But I think the thread I most want to pick up from what you've just described there is the complexity of the book. I admit I was also kind of confused reading through this, especially as you mentioned, getting to grips with kind of who's who and how they relate to each other, because there are quite a number of characters here. So when you are approaching this as a translation project, where do you start in terms of making sense of all of that? This.
- [13:01]
James Trapp
I'm a very unprofessional and untrained translator, so I tend just to head straight in, though, with this. I did watch quite a lot of the TV series and I also discovered that online, if you go through Baidu, the Chinese kind of search engine, there's actually a movable chart that charts all the different relationships. It's like a sort of. I'm not sure what the technical term is, but you have all the characters and then you have lines drawing their different connections and you can move that around. So when I got befuddled, it was very useful occasionally to refer to that. But essentially I work first and then go back and revise where necessary. If I've misunderstood initially relationship that becomes clearer later on, then I go back. There's simply not the time. I don't think many translators actually read the entire book before they start translating. I certainly don't, though I found myself specializing rather in an immensely long novel, so there's absolutely no chance of doing that. But I work as I go along and then go back and revise and. And so on, which is probably a terrible way to do it, but it's what suits me and what I've developed.
- [14:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, the key thing is that it suits you. So as long as that works in that sort of process, then what do you find to be the trickiest aspect of translating novels from Mandarin to English? Obviously you've done a number of those sorts of translations. So sort of in general, are there aspects that you sort of tend to think in advance, oh, I need to watch out for that?
- [14:50]
James Trapp
Not specifically, no. It very much depends on the individual novel. What's surprising and then what I hope surprises readers who begin to delve into Chinese fiction is that the underlying themes and the characters, their emotions and so on are almost all entirely recognizable to a Western audience. In fact, this is generally what surprises people about going to China, apart from its huge size and so on. Underlying it all, people are just people and you get on really well with them. And that the same. There aren't certainly in contemporary novels, there aren't any challenges like that. Sometimes you find yourself having to. My particular. The editor I've worked most with has a particular aversion to footnotes. And that's one of the challenges in that you sometimes have to find ways of explaining unfamiliar concepts or even things or situations by trying to incorporate the explanation into the text rather than otherwise you would be resorting to footnotes with alarming frequency. I think he managed to cut down the footnotes in this to a mere handful, though there's potential for many more, but specific problems translating. What I do watch out for is quotations, particularly because Chinese in general spoken language, everyday spoken language, is littered with allusions to ancient history, quotations from poetry or from old novels and so on, which are just part of the way of expressing yourself, but which are entirely unfamiliar to the West. And if they're in verse, which quite often happens when there are quotations or they're from one of the ancient delight, if they're from Confucius or the Art of War or the. The Romance and the Three Kingdoms, whatever, you have to be sure of your translation because it's. Particularly with the classics, there can be two or three accepted translations of the same phrase. The Dao de Jing is possibly the worst for that. So you have to make sure you get that right. And it's a very common part, as I say, of. Of both written and spoken Chinese because it reflects the way that China's history and the long history of their civilization that they're immensely proud of, is an integral part of the modern day in a way that history to us is history. History to the Chinese is part of the development that got them to where they are. It's very relevant still. And that sometimes causes or you have to stop and think a bit about what you're doing with references like that.
- [18:15]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I can imagine. Those would definitely sort of require, as you said, a bit of a sort of pause moment to consider with this novel then were any of those things especially challenging or anything else tricky that came up for this project specifically?
- [18:30]
James Trapp
Not those in particular. I'm cudgelling because it's about three or four years since I translated this. Obviously I have looked at it since, but I can't remember anything particular like that. But what is. There's a more modern phenomenon which is the titles and the posts both in companies, but particularly the political posts, because the company involved in this is a state owned company. There are all manner of committees, discipline inspection committees and all sorts that are constantly meeting or being referred to. And then there are external political committees as well, which become involved, keeping track of them and also making sure that you get the correct translations of the titles. Of the various posts and being aware of the difference between assistant secretaries and secretaries and and so on. That was actually, for me one of the major challenges of that and keeping track of who is who in that respect, because obviously their particular post, if they hold one, influences how they're acting and who they're interacting with and so on. So this extraordinary complexity of political apparatus both within and without the company is quite challenging to get on top of. I'm not sure I entirely did understand it by the end, but I think I got all the names right at least. Which is the first priority of a translator.
- [20:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, I can imagine that's high on the list of things that need to happen, but definitely a tricky one. Right. Loads of different characters running around, who knows who, who has what relationship to who, and then adding sort of kind of arcane job titles on top of that. Right, Lots going on then. So you mentioned earlier the publisher as being sort of part of the translation process. Can you tell us more about the role of the publisher, even the role of the author, perhaps? I mean, are you kind of off in a cave by yourself or are you interacting with any other people while doing all of this?
- [20:48]
James Trapp
It varies, but I'm always in contact with. With the publisher, never directly with the author, which I think is a good thing. It's good to have at least one level of remove between translator and author. But yes, and I've always had a native Chinese speaking editorial assistant who I can refer to if I'm completely stumped by something or I'm not sure if I've got the nuance right, I can refer to her. And we will sometimes go through two or three revisions of a particular section until we get it right. So that's the most direct input. Otherwise the publishers, their main role for me is finding me the work and then which. And so I get the easy bit because they then have the much more complicated tasks of securing all the rights and then promoting it and selling it to booksellers and so on. Which Sinoist, who I think are now the leading publishers of contemporary translations, Chinese translations are becoming extremely adept at. So, as I say, I am to an extent sitting in glorious seclusion, just getting on with my translating while everyone else buzzes around madly doing the hard work.
- [22:21]
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- [22:46]
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- [23:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, in some ways that sounds nice, but I also imagine it can mean that sometimes it's sort of tricky to figure out. Like, have I gotten that right? Have I finished that translation? Like, how do you know when, yes, that word works? Or okay, this paragraph has started now. Or all right, I can stop looking at this chapter. Like, how do you know when you found the right translation?
- [23:53]
James Trapp
It depends very much what you mean by the right translation. I mean, in fact, some people will say that a translation is never finished, although it does become kind of finite when it's published. But it doesn't mean that you're necessarily completely happy with it. There are always probably ways of revising effectively, though. You simply have to rely on our own instincts. And I, when I I'm asked to talk about translation, which I do more in in China, thankfully, than over here, because I probably get shot down in flames by academic translators. I tell people, especially budding translators in China, that the most important thing is actually command of your own language. You have to be absolutely sure that you write very, very good English or very, very good Chinese before you start embarking on translating, you have to build up a huge armory of styles, vocabulary, all sorts of things. And then you have to rely you have confidence in that so that you know when something sounds right. More often than not, you know when something sounds wrong. And then you settle, oh, yeah, okay, it's never that will do. But it's yes, I think that's the best I can do. Although you do get the kind of tunnel vision when you're translating and you get stuck into this. Well, certainly the way I work, you get stuck into this text and you can lose perspective a little bit. And it's occasionally surprisingly easy to find yourself Dropping into Chinese sentence formation, Chinese thought patterns is fine because that's what's being represented, as long as they're understandable. And that Chinese way of thinking and the Western way of thinking differs superficially in many respects because of this huge difference in the way the language works. Fundamentally, though, there's nothing that's too unfamiliar, but there are particular patterns of speech in Chinese that can be rendered incompletely but sound unnatural. But at the time, it's how your brain's working, because your brain's working with the Chinese, and so it kind of accepts that pattern. So you have to step back and look out for those. Also, my wife, who unofficially proofreads quite a lot of my work, she's actually a professional editor for Signoist as well, but she never officially edits my work. She will say, you were tired when you were doing that, weren't you? Or you were thinking about something else. She can see when concentration is slipping in the translation, so you always have to go back and check for that kind of thing. But generally, as I say, you have to have belief in your own ability with the English language, which is something that you acquire kind of by osmosis. I mean, I'm now something I can't remember even how old I am, 66 or something like that, but I've been reading for as long as I can remember, and I don't care what I read. I read indiscriminately. And that's actually been one of my major. Part of my armory for this is that I know lots of different styles. Not sort of highfaluting literary styles I know, but I know how to write or know what different types of writing should sound like. And that's something you just acquire over quite a long period of time.
- [27:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it definitely speaks to kind of the fact that some of these processes are learned and thought through. And first I look at this, then I do that, and some of them are not so sort of structured. They're more kind of organic as one develops the sort of muscle and the skill really, of figuring all of this out, given this, then, was very much not your first time translating a novel like this. Was there anything particularly unusual or surprising to you about this project?
- [28:16]
James Trapp
No, he says helpfully. No, I don't think so. Looking back, we've kind of covered the area that took me aback at first, which was the complexity of it. But linguistically speaking, it's very well and clearly written. And in fact, I think to an extent, you can detect Joel Mason's background also in Script writing and so on, which I believe he did. And which is why this was so readily turned into both this and the other book, into films and novels, films and TV programs. So it wasn't a difficult challenge linguistically. It was. I'm thinking back now because one of the things that you have to do, or, I mean, I say you, what I have to do is fight you. The first thing you do, really, when, as the translation begins, is to find a voice and a rhythm. Like languages and all books have their own rhythm, which comes from the language and the phrasing and so on. And from that you also get something of the voice of the author. Sometimes the author comes through more clearly than others in the book. In this case, not so much. But finding the rhythm of this and being able to transfer that into English, I think was the main struggle. I think I'm thinking back to when I actually started on this. It took a long time for it to resolve itself in my head into how it was going to sound. Some books just carry you along with them. Others you have to work harder at to get. I mean, it flows perfectly well. It flows very well in Chinese, but it wasn't the easiest to recreate that kind of flow in English. And I couldn't exactly say why. I could look back at the text, but there was something about it. And I think it was partly to do with the subject matter. And initially, some of the relationships between the characters who were introduced early on don't become immediately apparent. He's not a didactic writer in that way. He doesn't bombard you with direct information, which actually quite a lot of writers, both actually in English and Chinese, tend to do. And that. That disrupts the rhythm of creative writing. So he's more slightly more oblique or he takes his time establishing relationships. And so I think that threw me to begin with. I wasn't sure exactly how this person would be talking to whoever he was talking to or whatever until you. Until you know their relationships. Although it is apparent from the Chinese, because you have the same distinctions in the way people talk to each other in Chinese as you do in other languages. It took a little bit of adjusting and then so occasionally going back when you realize that, oh, actually that's how their relationship is. So maybe he wouldn't. Or she wouldn't have said that in that way in English. So, yes, that took a little time to get into. But I think within about in the first quarter of the novel, you've got most things straight, though he does throw curveballs at you as you go on through the novel and characters reappear or who have only been mentioned before suddenly take center stage or whatever. So there's a lot of going back and forth, cross referencing to be done to make sure that you've got that right. So in that respect it was more complicated than some, though I'm used to that to an extent. It was familiar actually, from a couple of historical novels that I've done, which also had huge casts. So it was something I realized I was prepared for once I realized that it's the same thing in a modern context as I'd encountered in historical ones. So, yeah, it was quite hard work to begin with this one. I do remember that.
- [32:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I can imagine. I think the comparison with historical fiction actually kind of works quite well in a way. But that was certainly the sense that I got from it that in one aspect of the novel you're kind of in this world of modern office buildings and conference rooms and that sort of thing, but the sort of intertwined networks and personalities would still work if we're talking about Game of Thrones or something like that. There was an element of sort of this interconnected, some official connection, some not that kind of made sense of these otherwise kind of mundane spaces. So I'm not surprised that that was kind of something that you found and thankfully helpful in piecing all of this together.
- [33:32]
James Trapp
Yeah. And in fact there are. He does overtly sort of weave in references to much older things like towards. You have. There are three characters. One of them is the. The lead character. There's no hero in this book, or there are flawed heroes and antiheroes, but one of the main characters, Lin Manchan, who's the boss of the whole conglomerate and the arch corrupter and corruptee. He is part of a group of three, two other very corrupt businessmen who come to sticky ends. And they're referred to as the three brothers of the Apricot Garden because of a particular occasion when they sort of swore brotherhood. And that's actually a direct reference to an episode in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms Going, which is a historical novel from the Ming Dynasty, but talking about the sort of third century A.D. and there's a very famous the Oath of the Peach Garden in which three principal characters swear an oath of brotherhood. So there's a direct connection between being made there. And then in more recent times you get a flavor of what was going on in the early days of, or say in the 60s within state owned companies and this system of apprentices and so on. There's A very rather powerful. She doesn't have a huge role, but there's a retired model worker who was the apprentice master of three of the main characters. And there are some descriptions of what their apprenticeship was like in steel works and other places under this, with this woman supporting them. And she continues from that time. She remains a major influence in their lives right up to the present day, which is another small example of this kind of continuity that you find everywhere in China. Things don't become history, they just become old, but they're still very much relevant. And there are several little. I'm sure I probably missed many more kind of references like that because the problem with not having been brought up and educated in China, these are. As Chinese, these things are. Which are simply part of. Become part of your consciousness because you hear about them all the time, they're part of your education and so on. And you will pick up certain characters, even you will immediately make you think of some reference or other. And it's difficult for a Westerner to pick up on all of those. I recently just finished translating a very long two volume novel about the establishment of a contemporary Confucian institute or an institute for contemporary Confucian studies. And every page had some reference rather there because it was full of modern academics showing off how esoteric their knowledge was and so on. And so it's littered. You know, I picked up as many as I could, but you can't catch them all. And there's an element of that in most translations. I think there are going to be subtleties that a foreigner doesn't necessarily pick up. Which is one of the advantages, of course, of having a native speaker as an editorial assistant.
- [37:24]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, it's a whole, clearly it's a whole involved process. So thank you for taking us a bit behind the scenes of it in this instance. And you mentioned of course that you're working on other projects as well with this book out in the world. Anything you're currently working on you want to give a brief sneak preview of?
- [37:41]
James Trapp
Yes, actually I'm currently working on two things which are completely different poles of my translating experience. I'm co translating and editing a collection of, I think it's 20 essays by contemporary Chinese archaeologists on recent archaeological finds in China and how they are altering perspectives and altering our understanding of the development of Chinese civilization. What got me into Chinese in the first place was Chinese art. I was taken to an exhibition of Chinese art in London when I was 13 and it grabbed me. And from that moment on it's weird and I can't explain it or what it was, but what I saw there fascinated me and I want to find out more. And that was the start of my Chinese journey. And I did special papers at university Prehan Early Archaeology and Buddhist sculpture. So that's always been an interest. So having a chance to read contemporary and very exciting Chinese finds, there are some extraordinary things turning up which are actually fundamentally going to alter our understanding of how. How civilization develops in China. That's great fun. I'm doing that with a colleague from what is it, University in Chengdu, a professor there called Liu Bo and we're coming towards the end of the process. It's quite technical translation but fortunately because I have the background in Chinese art and at least it's not completely baffling and we're hoping that that's going to be published later this year, which would be good. And then I've also just started on. It's kind of a novel. It's recently published by a former police officer from Hangzhou and she is writing about cases that she heard about that particularly fascinated her, mostly because of the input of her fellow officers. I think she rather feels that Chinese policemen get a fairly rough deal in terms of their image. I imagine all policemen across the world feel the same cause it's a thankless task. But she centers on a number of quite well known cases and interviewed the officers, the principal officers involved in investigating. And she looks at how these cases actually affected them and what it meant to them, how much they had to sacrifice to it and so on. I've only just started that, but it's a very interesting book and I had pleasure of meeting the author just after the London Book Fair last week, who is a fascinating woman and absolutely passionate about this which comes through. She writes beautifully. She's not a professional writer author, but she felt she had to write these stories and so they have a directness which is going to be. I hope I'm going to be able to. To catch her writing actually makes it very easy for that. So yeah, those are the two I'm on at the moment which will keep me going for a while and then who knows is the answer. I never know what's going to turn up and I always kind of assume that the book I've just finished is going to be my last. But thankfully that has not been the case so far.
- [41:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, it'll certainly be intriguing to see what comes next. And of course while you are off on those projects, listeners can read the book we've been discussing that you translated published by Sinoist in 2025. Originally written in Chinese by Joe Mason, titled in English, Property of the People. James, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [41:57]
James Trapp
Not at all. It's been a pleasure. I do like the sound of my own voice, but I like talking about this. I'm passionate about this work because I think we ought to be reading more Chinese fiction as a way. As probably the best way of understanding China. So it's been a privilege to have this time with you.