Here is an absurd little episode from translation history: in the late Qing and early Republican period, a man celebrated as the king of translators, with a shelf of books to his name, could not read a single foreign letter. His name was Lin Shu, a native of Min County in Fujian, a master of classical prose who had never studied a foreign language. According to China Tibet News, in its piece on the Chinese stage history of La Dame aux Camélias, and to an essay titled The Translator Who Knew No Foreign Languages published on the Xuexi platform, around 1897 he lost his mother and then his wife and fell into low spirits. A friend, Wei Han, suggested he work on a translation with Wang Shouchang, who had returned from studying in France, as a distraction. Wang held a novel by Dumas fils and read it aloud; Lin wrote it down in classical Chinese, and the two were said to weep together over the moving passages. They titled it the Story of the Parisian Camellia Lady, Lin signing himself Leng Hongsheng and Wang signing as Xiao Zhai Zhu Ren. When the Changyan Press edition appeared in the summer of 1899 it sold out again and again, and readers called it a foreign version of Dream of the Red Chamber.
The method, described in his own words as "the ear receives and the hand pursues; the voice stops and the brush stops", was astonishingly productive. The People's Daily app, in its piece on Lin Shu as a modern translator, describes the pair on a boat on the Min River, Wang reading from the original while Lin wrote, the next sentence already on paper before the previous one had finished being spoken, some six thousand characters set down in a four-hour day. The Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau's version of the same essay records his claim of fifteen hundred characters an hour. Over the following two decades he worked with nearly twenty collaborators, including Wei Yi, Chen Jialin, Wang Qingji and Zeng Zonggong, translating works by more than a hundred authors from a dozen countries. Sources differ on the total, from over 160 to over 180 titles, but "Lin translations" became a term in literary history of its own. Dickens's Dombey and Son became Ice and Snow Fate, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin became The Black Slave's Cry to Heaven, and Dumas père's The Knight of the Red House became The Flowers of the Jade Tower: titles that sounded more like old Chinese fiction than the originals did.
That is also where the joke lives. People teased him about his strong Fujian accent: why was Conan Doyle's detective rendered Fu Er Mo Si rather than Hu Er Mo Si, given how he pronounced those syllables? Joking aside, working without the original exacted a price. Turning Shakespeare and Ibsen plays into novels, mistaking abridged children's editions for the originals, and plenty of places where the wording missed the sense became the standard examples cited by later critics. Yet the other side holds up too: Zheng Zhenduo, reading Lin's Dickens, said that even humour, the hardest thing to carry across, came through, and contemporaries paired Lin with Yan Fu, translator of Tian Yan Lun, as the two leading translators of their day. A man who knew no foreign language, leaning on his command of his mother tongue and on one reliable reader, opened a whole generation's window onto the world.
One reading, one writing is a very old craft
Lin Shu was not an isolated case. China News Service, in an essay comparing novel translation with sutra translation, traces the line back more than a thousand years. During the Eastern Han, An Qing from Anxi translated scriptures in Luoyang, and Yan Fotiao recorded that some were "explained orally" and some "transmitted in writing", showing that dictation and transcription by another hand already existed. An Xuan and Yan Fotiao worked together in a way praised as "oral presentation" and "receiving by brush": one rendered the Sanskrit into spoken Chinese, the other set it down in written form. By the Tang dynasty, Xuanzang's translation of the Yogacarabhumi Sastra divided the work even more finely. Xuanzang "held the Sanskrit and rendered it into Tang speech", Ling Hui and others "received the meaning by brush", others "verified the Sanskrit" against the source and "corrected the characters", several monks "examined the larger meaning", and a final hand "wove the text" into polished prose. A reader, a writer, a source checker, a sense checker and a style editor, each owning one stage — the boat on the Min River was following the old workshop rules.
Division of labour is not ceremony; it is several gates against drift
The elaborate procedure addressed exactly where translation goes wrong. The reader may mishear or omit; the recorder may quietly rewrite; the polisher may swap a term because it reads better. That is why the workshop kept someone whose only job was to go back to the source, someone who looked only at the sense, and someone who looked only at the wording. In modern terms, the shared name table across channels in the industry article and the field-by-field checking of names and numbers in the company article do the same job: settle who has the final say first, then let each stage answer for its own segment. Lin Shu's weak spots arose precisely because the "verify the Sanskrit" stage was missing — the original was never in his hands, so nobody could check back. It is also why experienced translators ask one extra question about any job handled from start to finish by a single person: who checked the source for you?
Beautiful titles still need someone to keep them in order
Titles like The Black Slave's Cry to Heaven and Ice and Snow Fate still read beautifully today, and that is the mother tongue at work; turning plays into novels and abridgements into originals came from the same brush. Once a title or a format convention is fixed, every later volume and every cross-reference has to follow it, or readers end up holding two names and two versions of the same thing. What old translators call "one name, one rendering" does not mean never changing anything; it means changes are recorded and traceable. Proper-noun tables, terminology lists and version logs, the least romantic items in the trade, often decide whether a translation can be used for years. There is something amusing about it: the most durable legacy of a workshop built on one voice and one brush was not a brilliant line but a division of labour.
To finish
So what is worth remembering about the translator who knew no foreign language is not the oddity but the way it breaks translation into separately accountable tasks: understanding the source, writing the target, checking the source, checking the sense, standardising the wording. The industry article describes the permanent multilingual services cities are adding for year-round visitor flows, and the company article describes documents checked field by field at a service counter; more than a thousand years earlier, the people in those translation workshops, each owning one stage, had already laid out the answer. Tools change; the stages do not. Much of the pleasure in this job lives in someone being willing to ask one more question about whether this word really means that.
The historical material and quotations here come from China Tibet News on the Chinese stage history of La Dame aux Camélias, the Xuexi platform and the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau essay The Translator Who Knew No Foreign Languages, the People's Daily app piece on Lin Shu, and China News Service on novel and sutra translation. Sources differ slightly on the total number of Lin Shu's translations, so the figures are given as a range.