Sitting in a small room down a dark corridor in the old, fading white building of the People's Literature Publishing House, Ma Ainong looks the part of a humble scholar from a bygone era. Her short black hair, deep purple sweater and calm, soft-spoken demeanour are slightly out of sync with the bold orange and blood-red lettering of a nearby Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows poster; that was a title she helped usher into the best-sellers list of China's cut-throat book market.
Ma, 43, is one of two official Chinese translators of J.K. Rowling's phenomenally successful Harry Potter series. As the spokeswoman of choice at many book-launching parties in Beijing, she's also been the main 'face' for the Chinese edition of the series. Her fellow translator on the project is her younger sister, Ma Aixin, who lived until recently in Cleveland, Ohio. The latest Potter project follows the sisters' five earlier Potter translations in the past eight years. Their deft touch has helped sell 10 million copies of the series throughout China.
'When you think about it, the series is very cleverly done - it's so close to the everyday school life of the young teenagers, with all the main characters having to do homework and all,' says Ma.
According to the People's Literature Publishing House, the last title in translation has been through two print runs and sold more than 1.1 million copies since its mid-October debut.
Ma, who has a deep passion for children's literature, wasn't among those originally assigned to work on the translations. In summer 2000, shortly after the publisher bought the rights to the first three Potter books, Wang Ruiqin, the editor in charge, assigned the books to Aixin, who was already translating elsewhere, and two other translators. 'I wasn't considered initially because I was already working full-time in-house as a book editor,' says Ma.
A few weeks later, however, Wang asked Ma to take over a half-translated Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone because the originally assigned translator became ill, says Wang. That sparked a working relationship between the sisters, with Ainong finishing the aborted Sorcerer's Stone and Aixin completing The Chamber of Secrets on her own. (The third in the series - the only one in the series not translated by the Ma sisters - was translated by Zheng Xumi.) The sisters came to be closely identified with the Chinese Harry Potter, going on to translate the rest of the collection. Often, the two worked on the same title to save time.
Ma, nine years older than Aixin, is no stranger to the translation field. The granddaughter of literary translator Ma Qinghuai, Ma says she developed an early interest in foreign literature as a student at Nanjing University. She became particularly interested in Lucy Maud Montgomery's classic children's novel, Anne of Green Gables, and on a whim decided to translate it into Chinese the summer after she graduated.