In a report for China’s state-run television channel CCTV in March, the Vietnamese writer and translator Trang Ha condemned the conservatism of Vietnamese literature, and the paucity of good-quality fiction available to her compatriots. She was speaking in response to the increasing availability of Chinese novels in Vietnam – works which have often taken a convoluted and heavily mediated route to market. These have been appearing in such quantity that Tuoi Tre, one of Vietnam’s leading newspapers, felt compelled to publish an editorial decrying the “rubbish Chinese fiction rife with mawkish and sexual elements” which has “cast an insidious spell on large numbers of Vietnamese teenagers and young adults”.
The novels in question originate in China’s vast wangluo wenxue (literally “network literature”) communities, online forums and discussion groups which have produced thousands of pieces of fiction, many of which have gone on to become bestsellers. Alongside traditional narratives, network literature includes multimedia texts containing graphics, photos and videos, and stories with multiple authors, with hundreds of contributors in extended threads which may roll on for years on message boards.
Trang Ha is one of the best known “official” translators of Chinese literature in Vietnam, but she is far from alone. The same online dynamics which generate wangluo wenxue fiction applies to its translation and dissemination, as websites host teams of fans busily translating the Chinese originals into Vietnamese. Some of these translators go on to secure contracts with local publishers to produce such works officially, while others, working under pseudonyms, post the results on their own blogs, and have developed reputations and followings that far outstrip those of the original authors. Tuoi Tre goes so far as to claim that many of them do not even speak Chinese, but use translation software and edit the often clumsy output, a process more akin to interpretation and adaptation than traditional literary translation, with Google as a prime collaborator. Nevertheless, the overwhelming popularity of the results suggests that certain stories will always find a way through.
