I’m Lone Crane.
I’ve been reading and studying wuxia for about 15 years now. I’ve translated a bit of it.
I’m originally from rural Kentucky, USA. I moved to Taiwan in 2010 with my wife. I have a daughter now and we live here permanently. When I first got here I took Chinese classes, but most of my study was reading on my one, using Wenlin software to paste chapters of wuxia novels in and mouseover to see the definitions. It used to take me hours to read a few paragraphs. I had some Classical Chinese tutoring at National Cheng Kung University as well which really helped my Chinese over all. In 2014 I achieved my initial goal of being able to just open a Chinese book and read it without needing to use my computer or a dictionary to get through it.
From 2017- mid 2018 I was Director of Operations at Wuxiaworld (under the name Guan Zhong). A fancy title, but really I was just an excecutive assistant. Among other things, I handled translator submissions, evaluting prospective translations. I also joined volare novels as a translator for a time, and became Head of Publishing there briefly in 2018. I evaluated translation submissions there as well.
Now, besides reading wuxia novels and studying the genre, I also do OCR work in the Chinese wuxia community at the Gu Long forums (my name there is 孤鶴), scanning old wuxia books and using OCR software to convert it to text, proofreading the results to fix errors. This work began among fans around 1998 and continues to this day. Because of fans uploading novels (which can be quite tedious, fixing all the typos), a great deal of the wuxia novels of the past are available to read in Chinese, preventing them from falling into obscurity and disappearing. There’s still a lot of work to do though. But fans continue to research the genre, working through the disordered, messy bibliographies to sort out who wrote what (a lot of books back in the day were printed legally and illegally under other people’s names).
My favorite wuxia author, by far, is Yun Zhongyue 雲中岳. I had an official translation of his novel《亡命之歌》under the Englith title Song of Exile back when volare novels was still around. Someday that translation will see the light of day again.
For a list of other wuxia translations in English see this list here.
