When I began to study Chinese at the University of Helsinki in the autumn of 1994, I could little imagine that I would one day become a translator of Chinese literature. I had indeed dreamed of becoming a translator and had successfully applied to study English translation. However, in my dreams of those study years I saw myself translating the likes of Virginia Woolf or Thomas Hardy.

As a translator into Finnish I often need to balance between the strange and the familiar, the exotic and the homely. For Finnish readers, the work of a Chinese writer also provides a glimpse into a distant culture and a different society, but it must be more than that.

From the University’s perspective, I must have been a dreadful student. I studied everything that interested me without any final goal in mind; I sat in countless lectures, but finished few study modules—in other words, I wasted resources and gained few study credits.

I dream of survival for the whole body of professional translators into Finnish. In past decades Finland has had a high-level translation culture and the significance of the quality of translations into Finnish was understood for the dissemination of world literature.