Becoming a global hit: Chinese best-sellers take on the world

Mai Jia attributed his popularity among foreign readers mainly to his books' translation. A good translation could give a novel a "second life," he said.

Both his books were translated by Olivia Milburn, an Oxford graduate in ancient Chinese. English readers were impressed by the classic beauty and elegant taste of the language in Decoded.

"This strange, twisting tale is told in fizzy, vivid and often beautiful prose," reads an Economist review, calling it a book "everyone should read" and Milburn's translation "a treasure."

With Mai Jia's brand appeal and Milburn's strength in language, foreign publishers expect The Message to become another global hit.

Mai Jia is not the only Chinese author who benefited from good translation. Liu Cixin's sci-fi epic, The Three-Body Problem translated into English by Ken Liu, garnered the Hugo Award, known as the sci-fi Nobel Prize.

Readers gave it four-and-a-half stars on Amazon's book review page, saying Ken Liu's translation "made incredibly smooth reading as if it were the original work."

Ken Liu, a Chinese-American sci-fi writer himself, said a translator would deliver the author's thoughts and emotions accurately "only if he could hear the author's voices in his mind."

The translation itself won't necessarily make a best-seller. A touching story that resonates with global readers is a must, literary critics said.

The London Book Review called The Three-Body Problem trilogy "one of the most ambitious works of science fictions ever written." It created a brandnew world, picturing a universe far beyond the three-dimensional world and predicted catastrophic consequences of humanity's attempt to contact an alien civilization, the review said.

At the 2018 Frankfurt event, the German version of Liu Cixin's Dark Forest, the second volume in the series, became the talk of the town.

Chen Feng, the copyright broker behind Liu Cixin's books, was delighted to see that almost every event Liu Cixin attended was overbooked. Watching the long queue in the author's book signing event, an attendee asked: "Is he a Nobel Prize winner?"

The path to global fame is not easy. Mai Jia and Liu Cixin wrote good stories. Translators broke the language barriers. It is the literary agents who brokered the deal with foreign publishers. They are the "invisible hands" pushing Chinese authors into the global market, observers and analysts said.