It has been 96 years since The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes was first introduced to Chinese readers. Now that the super sleuth is perhaps more popular than ever, Zhonghua Book Company will publish a new edition of the series on November 15.

In the 1916 edition of the series, the famous detective spoke authentic classical Chinese (wenyanwen), but in the new edition, the stories will be in modern Chinese (baihuawen), which is standard procedure for the series over the decades. What makes this new version interesting is that the news reports within the stories will return to their classical Chinese majesty.

The 1916 edition was translated by giants of the Chinese literary world at that time such as Cheng Xiaoqing, Zhou Shoujuan, Yan Duhe, Chen Xiaodie ... They translated Sherlock Holmes' words into plain classical Chinese.

In 1896, four stories of the series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were first published in China in Current Affairs Newspaper. In 1916, just four years after its establishment, Zhonghua Book Company published the first Chinese edition of The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes, which included 44 stories.

Li Jiazhen, translator for the new version of Holmes, is wild about classical Chinese and old English from the Victoria period in which Holmes lived, which he thinks is more elegant and implicit. But to Li, classical Chinese is still more beautiful than old English.

Li gave full play to this strength in the translation. The time described in the stories is the late Qing Dynasty in China, so he used classical Chinese to translate the news reports in the novel to give readers a sense of time.

"But I used easy classical Chinese. It's a detective novel, after all, and if the language is too difficult, readers will have a hard time understanding the cases."

Chinanews.com