Li Yao was an English major in college and finished his first English-to-Chinese book translation in his junior year. He became inspired after his lecturer gave him a high compliment on his translation, but he never expected he would one day become a translator himself, and like his lecturer, inspire numerous aspiring young translators.
More than five decades later, in March this year, Li received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Translation from the Translators Association of China for his long dedication to the country’s translation endeavors and cross-cultural communication.
Devotion to translation
In 1962, Li, at the age of 16, was admitted to the now Inner Mongolia Normal University in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and Leo Tolstoy’s and carefully compared them with the Chinese translations, studying them word by word, sentence by sentence, holding a large dictionary.
