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Last month saw the 30th birthday of one of Taiwan's great celebrities - Lucifer Chu, the man who translated the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy into Chinese in nine months at the age of 27. He took on the project shortly after the film version was announced, and worked 16 hours a day to finish it by the publisher's deadline.

There was already another translation in existence, put together decades earlier by six professors. Chu, however, felt that it showed little acquaintance with the fantasy-fiction genre and preferred not to look at it while working on his version.

Also, the other translation was only selling a very small  number of copies annually. Chu, by contrast, careful to ensure he was paid royalties rather than a lump sum, has in four years already made US$700,000 from his translation.

Nor were royalties the only condition he imposed. There was also to be no editing  without his prior approval.

As for the film versions of the Tolkien classic, Chu considers that whereas they did turn it into something of a Hollywood product, they had the huge virtue of leading millions of readers to the books.

He flew to New Zealand during the filming, and though not responsible for the Chinese subtitles, he did ensure that the place and character names used accorded with those in his translation.

Mainland China has a different translation on offer, but Chu's work is also available there in a pirated form. His uses traditional characters, but the pirates have got round this obstacle by putting it on the internet,  where, at the click of a key, it can be transposed into a reformed-script rendering.

Chu is, in my eyes, a typical Taiwanese maverick. It is true that he was given many English books by his father from a young age, and had already translated other fantasy-fiction works before he took on Lord of the Rings.

Even so, you would expect someone like that to have graduated in English, and probably in English literature, at that. But in a way that is both astonishing and typically Taiwanese, at university his main subject was electronics.

As for the name Lucifer, he chose it, he says, because in Latin it means 'light bringer'. Some Christians dislike it, nonetheless, because of associations with the devil, so sometimes he changes it.

Whenever he goes to the American west coast, for instance, he goes by the name of Rucifer.

A neat ruse, you might think, as most Americans can probably be counted on to forget that to Chinese ears, the Roman  letters 'l' and 'r' sounds are, for all intents and purposes, one and the same.



Lord of the translation