Romance of The Three Kingdoms - English Translations

English Translations

Romance of the Three Kingdoms has been translated into English by numerous scholars. The first known translation was performed in 1907 by John G. Steele and consisted of a single chapter excerpt that was distributed in China to students learning English at Presbyterian missionary schools. Z.Q. Parker published a 1925 translation containing four episodes from the novel including the events of the Battle of Red Cliffs, while Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang published excerpts in 1981 including chapters 43–50. A complete and faithful translation of the novel was published in two volumes in 1925 by Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor. The translation was well-written, but lacked any supplementary materials such as maps or character lists that would aid Western readers; a 1959 reprint was published that included maps and an introduction by Roy Andrew Miller to assist foreign readers. In 1976, Moss Roberts published an abridged translation containing one fourth of the novel including maps and more than 40 woodblock illustrations from three Chinese versions of the novel. Roberts' abridgement is reader-friendly, being written for use in colleges and to be read by the general public. After decades of work, Roberts published a full translation in 1991 complete with an Afterword, eleven maps, a list of characters, titles, terms, and offices, and almost 100 pages of notes from Mao Zonggang's commentaries and other scholarly sources. Roberts' complete translation remains faithful to the original; it is reliable yet still matches the tone and style of the classic text. Yang Ye, a professor in Chinese Literature at the UC Riverside, wrote in Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (1998) that Roberts' translation "supersedes Brewitt-Taylor's translation and will no doubt remain the definitive English version for many years to come." Roberts' translation was republished in 1995 by the Foreign Languages Press without the illustrations.