[ESSAY] “Shaped by Hong Kong, Sharpened by Wudang: Gigi Chang’s Translation Practice” by Debra Liu
For those of us influenced by the legendary Jin Yong (Louis Cha) Legends of the Condor Heroes series, yet unable to read lengthy works in Chinese, the appearance of a set of translations of these classics was a long awaited pleasure.
The books produced, beginning with Anna Holmwood’s translation of A Hero Born (2018) and followed by Gigi Chang’s A Bond Undone (2019), did not disappoint. Readers became immersed in the wuxia world of Guo Jing, Lotus Huang, and an assortment of characters belonging to diverse martial arts clans. For readers of English, the Beggar Clan came alive on Peach Blossom Island.
Yet translation is an under recognised art.
Translators’ names often do not appear on book covers and frequently go unrecognised in literary awards. Most recently, the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature was won by László Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian author writing in Hungarian, yet the Nobel Prize website makes no mention of his translators, without whom the work would be inaccessible to most English speakers.
Effective translation involves a complex set of skills. Most importantly, it requires a deep intercultural competence combined with linguistic mastery in multiple languages. The ability to understand cultural nuances and reflect them in the translated language is crucial, as is an understanding of the structure, pacing, and flow of complete works, together with the ability to replicate these qualities in the target language.
I spoke with Gigi Chang about her translation practice and how she came to translate one of the world’s most beloved authors, Jin Yong (pictured).
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“We grew up watching Jin Yong on TV,” Gigi said. “My friends and I would wave rulers at each other, pretending they were swords. We loved the movies and the TV series. They were part of Hong Kong life. I suppose I absorbed his stories by osmosis.”
Movies and television series were predominantly in Cantonese, produced by the legendary Shaw Brothers film studio and TVB. Jin Yong himself set guidelines for the films. They were not to be excessively gory or bloodthirsty, a stylistic choice that made them suitable for young children to watch.
While life at home, including the viewing of television series, was predominantly experienced in Cantonese, the colonial school system operated in English. The dual nature of familial, colloquial, spoken Cantonese, combined with English as the formal language of thinking and writing, produced a generation of people whose social interactions were predominantly in Cantonese while their formal writing was conducted in English.
Gigi grew up functionally bilingual, required to translate first hand experiences into written English, as demanded by the colonial system. “I grew up speaking Cantonese, but English was my first language in writing,” she explained.
This was the first forge of a translator’s sword, to use a metaphor pertinent to Jin Yong: the acculturation, from childhood, of a life lived in one language and rendered into written form in another.
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Chang’s first experience of translation was largely circumstantial. While living in London and working at the Victoria and Albert Museum, she began rendering Chinese exhibition texts into English. After returning to Hong Kong, this skill, developed largely through happenstance, led to further opportunities. She began translating promotional material for Chinese language cultural productions for English readers.
A chance meeting with Anna Holmwood gave Chang her first opportunity in literary translation. Holmwood later secured the English rights for the Condor series. “When Anna suggested working on the Condor series together, I jumped at the chance,” said Gigi. “After all, I’d grown up with the stories.”
The first Jin Yong novel that Chang translated in full was the second book in the Condor series, A Bond Undone. She has spoken about how translating martial arts proved to be the greatest challenge. “Jin Yong wasn’t a martial artist himself, but he was very knowledgeable,” Gigi explained, “and he was also quite liberal with time and place. He had no problem bending real history and real people to the needs of his stories.”
Jin Yong. Legends of the Condor Heroes.
Vol. 2: A Bond Undone. Translated by Gigi Chang.
For Chang, this occasionally produces a degree of moral unease. “Some of the characters in the novels I’m translating are actual deities, but they’re often not written in the most flattering light,” she said. “It took a while before that crossover between the fictional and the spiritual sank in. And now, every time I have to write about them, my panic level soars. I make a point of visiting temples and kowtowing to Ancestor Qiu these days.”
Chang is referring to Qiu Chuji 丘處機, a renowned Daoist who founded the Dragon Gate school and served as abbot of Beijing’s famous White Cloud Temple, where he was later buried. Qiu Chuji is known for travelling across China to visit the Mongolian ruler Chingghis Khan, persuading him to adopt a more moderate approach to the killing of his adversaries. The Condor series, however, portrays him quite differently, as a fiery priest with an impulsive temperament.
“For the past months, I’ve been editing a section about the Seven Immortals of the Quanzhen Sect,” said Gigi. “During that time, I happened to be in Beijing for an exhibition, so I made a trip to the White Cloud Temple to kowtow to them, especially Hao Datong and Sun Bu’er. Now whenever I’m in Beijing or pass by a Quanzhen altar, I feel I ought to appeal to their magnanimity on my knees.”
Kowtowing to Daoist deities was Chang’s way of reconciling the fictional portrayal of real people in Jin Yong’s work.
While kowtowing to Daoist deities was Chang’s way of reconciling the fictional portrayal of real people in Jin Yong’s work, her approach to place and martial arts was more practical.
“Translating Jin Yong has given me the incentive to travel more around China,” she said. “Jin Yong had not visited all of the places he wrote about when he wrote the series, so travelling gives me a deeper sense of place and allows me to be more specific when I write.”
Chang’s commitment to place and history gives her a sense of “physical embodiment”, what her editor refers to as “method translation”, that supports her translation practice. “When I travel, I try to see as much as possible of the art and architecture from similar periods, to give me an idea of where and from what backgrounds the characters came.”
Chang’s training in art history also proved valuable. Song dynasty paintings gave her a sense of the buildings, clothing, and animals of the period. She goes to considerable lengths. “I turn to historical atlases, archaeological reports, and academic books to figure out the routes and road systems the characters travel on, how wide the roads were, and what the road conditions were like, for example. This allows me to imagine the environment in greater detail as I translate.”
While travel informs her sense of place, it also gives her the opportunity to learn more about martial arts. “Martial arts makes up a large portion of the story,” Chang explained, “and the vocabulary, the verbs describing the action and the basic stances, consists of specialist terms referring to specific sequences of movement used for centuries within the martial arts community. In English, however, there is hardly an equivalent set of words. Terms used in boxing, fencing, other combat sports, or dance are often too straightforward in the motion they describe, or they are not everyday terms, or they come from another language, as French often does in fencing or dance. The Chinese martial arts terms used in English today, commonly found in kung fu schools, are either very literal and therefore lack a sense of motion, or they are transliterations from Cantonese or Mandarin, which are not helpful when I am trying to tell a story and evoke an atmosphere.”
I asked Chang how she approached this challenge. “Although Jin Yong invented most of his martial arts clans and techniques, he relied on an existing specialised vocabulary to describe the action. When depicting physical combat, rather than remaining vague, it was important for me to visit the places and learn the traditions. It is rather like trying to describe the sound of a violin without ever having heard one.”
“When I first started the translation, I took up tai chi classes, then moved on to other Wudang internal fist kung fu. As someone who is not particularly coordinated, the experience was very helpful when writing about Guo Jing’s struggles to learn new techniques. Although neigong, or inner strength, sounds mystical in the story, it is not purely imaginative. Much of Chinese martial arts concerns flow, the continuous and connected movement of strength through the body and between each movement. With The Return of the Condor Heroes, which contains many more weapon based fights, I undertook intensive crash courses in the use of the horsetail whisk and the sword. I even tried archery during a trip to south west China. I had never really handled a bow and arrow before, but within a few attempts I managed a bullseye from thirty metres away. Perhaps I have absorbed a little of the skill of the martial masters and superb archers, simply because I spend so much time thinking about them while translating.”
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Most recently, Chang travelled to Wudangshan to study Wudang sword. “I was in a tiny village deep in the mountains, and it felt as though I had been transported through time and place into one of Jin Yong’s stories. Starting training early each morning while it was still dark, with the Big Dipper shimmering overhead, or trekking along ancient trails to the peak to catch the sunrise, it was really like being in a wuxia film. As I have only ever lived in a city, I had never seen nights this dark or stars this bright. It offered a glimpse into how people once lived and travelled, as well as what the characters see when they roam across China. All of this, I believe, feeds back into the translation.”
While theorists speak of locating voice in translated works within the “spatial, temporal, and cognitive location in which the narrator is anchored in the world of the narrative” (Slater, p. 6), Chang simply travelled to the places Jin Yong wrote about. Allowing readers to unlock the “narrative domain” involves specialised linguistic knowledge. According to Herman (2002), the use of spatial adverbs and various kinds of adjectives is crucial in anchoring a sense of place. Out of a desire to make the works of Jin Yong readable, enjoyable, and meaningful to readers of English, Chang carefully chooses words, sentence patterns, and scenic organisation to bring the narrative to life.
An example of this strategy from A Heart Divided:
Guo Jing managed to duck away from the handful of mud, but his footwork was hampered by the three feet of clay lining the pond. Madam Ying, meanwhile, was at home in her natural environment, skimming, skating, sliding over the silt. Her already speedy onslaught was now swifter than ever, a blur of stabs and slaps as she scooped up sludge to sling in her opponent’s face.
Jin Yong. Legends of the Condor Heroes.
Vol. 4: A Heart Divided. Translated by Gigi Chang & Shelly Bryant.
Yet rather than immersing herself in translation theory, Chang’s approach has been to honour the stories she grew up with. To do so, she has visited Jin Yong’s (Louis Cha’s) ancestral home and the places that populate the stories in order to anchor the text in its locations, and she has personally studied martial arts so that the physical dimension of the narrative can be embodied in her translation practice.
While the first forge of Chang’s translator’s sword was formed through translating a lived life in spoken Cantonese into written English, via the Hong Kong colonial education system, she continued to temper that sword through immersion in place and the practice of martial arts.
If a good sword is forged from thousand folded steel, Chang’s translation practice has likewise been folded and reforged through continual immersion in martial arts and the landscapes of China.
I asked Chang that if she were to give her translation style a martial arts name, what it would be.
She said, “I work very slowly. I wish I could be more efficient, so it’s not going to be something cool. Snail Crawls through a Wood would be an apt description, both of my pace and of Jin Yong’s epic stories.”
The peak of Wudang at dawn. Photo © Gigi Chang
Bibliography
▚ Jin Yong. Legends of the Condor Heroes. Vol. 1: A Hero Born. Translated by Anna Holmwood.
▚ Jin Yong. Legends of the Condor Heroes. Vol. 2: A Bond Undone. Translated by Gigi Chang.
▚ Jin Yong. Legends of the Condor Heroes. Vol. 3: A Snake Lies in Waiting. Translated by Anna Holmwood and Gigi Chang.
▚ Jin Yong. Legends of the Condor Heroes. Vol. 4: A Heart Divided. Translated by Gigi Chang and Shelly Bryant.
▚ Jin Yong. Return of the Condor Heroes. Vol. 1: A Past Unearthed. Translated by Gigi Chang.
▚ Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
▚ Slater, Catherine (2011). “Location, Location, Translation: Mapping Voice in Translated Story Worlds.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 3 (2011).
How to cite: Liu, Debra. “Shaped by Hong Kong, Sharpened by Wudang: Gigi Chang’s Translation Practice.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 6 Mar. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/03/06/gigi-chang.
Debra Liu is the author of Into the Mountains, Exploring China’s Sacred Daoist Peaks (Earnshaw Books, 2025). She is an ordained Daoist and a member of Qingsong Guan (青松观) in Australia. When she is not writing, she can be found walking along the beach, reading fantasy books, or watching wuxia and xianxia dramas.
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