Of course there are advantages and disadvantages of where you are based if you are a translator. When I was in China I lived in the language and it was much easier to keep up on the latest slang and usage, and there were more native speakers to get help from if I was stumped. In the US I’m more in tune with my target language, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing I suppose. One thing I was pleasantly surprised with upon moving back here was being able to rediscover the local libraries. Not only do they have full seasons of TV shows I have missed, but also books that have helped me in my translation work. I’d say that I have benefitted from visiting a library for every single one of the larger projects that I have worked on this year. Mostly I visited the research library at a local public university, but the city libraries have actually helped out a lot as well. 

In China on the other hand, I dread the thought of going to the library. When I first came to China to teach English I was denied access to the university library even though I was a teacher at the school. Other than that only made one or two trips to the Peking U. library, and never got to visit the Bookworm, so I can’t say that I’m an expert by any means. But taking the Peking U. library for an example, I remember going once on a weekend to find that visitors were only allowed in on weekdays during business hours. So I came again during the week, and I had to hand over my passport to an old man near the entrance who kept it in a drawer of a little wooden desk. 

When I was in graduate school I had some conversations with veterans of doing research in China who had plenty of horror stories about trying to penetrate the defenses of the Chinese libraries. One of them told me I had to be well prepared in advance with lots of cash on hand, a tiny camera to secretly take pictures of the materials with, and lots of time. Some people hired a helper to copy out materials by hand. One of my professors even described Chinese libraries as being more like 藏书楼, or book storehouses, rather than lending facilities. 

Not that they don’t have some great materials in their libraries, but as a Chinese to English translator, I mostly need to find out how to write about things in English. Even though I live in the middle of nowhere Southwest Michigan, if I need, say, to access a 1972 copy of some economics journal, I just head over to the local research library, and can get what I need in less than an hour. It’s sad, though, to see that many public libraries here are having their budgets cut due to the economic crisis.

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