Writing community with a shared future
Users are increasingly getting hooked to translations of voluminous Chinese novels online before themselves writing 400-chapter books, some later adapted for television, Mei Jia reports.
Almas Ilyas, a Pakistani, would never have imagined she could finish reading a novel that has more than 400 chapters. But she did. And by the time she finished reading a translated Chinese novel online, the experience opened up a whole new world of opportunities for her.
Briton Jack Garden Shawn has read such voluminous Chinese novels a few times and says he now does not feel like reading anything that has less than 1,700 chapters. He has no dearth of choices online.
The latest report on China's online literature scene, released by the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association on the fourth China Online Literature Plus Conference in September, says that 3,452 original Chinese titles had been translated into foreign languages by 2019; that includes 1,700 titles in English on the sector's leading website Webnovel.
