Resouce;http://en.shisu.edu.cn/resources/news/goethe-to-be-translated
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specialist team at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) will today start work on a five-year project to translate the complete works of German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe into Chinese. This is the largest translation project launched by Chinese academia since 1949.
The program will be partly financed by an 800,000 yuan (US$128,000) grant from the national social science fund, the university said. Eighty experts from China and Germany will work on the project, which aims to produce between 40 to 50 books containing 30 million Chinese characters. Though Goethe is known around the world, very little of his writing has been translated into Chinese. “The end result will be a huge database of Goethe’s work,” said Wei Maoping, dean of SISU’s School of Germanic Studies and the program’s director.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is one of the most celebrated German writers in the history of world literature. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of meters and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and color; and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him are extant.
