Chinese translations often drop tricky references

Li Jihong started learning English at 12. Still under 30, Li has 21 published volumes of translations to his credit. He completed translating Khaled Hosseini's bestselling novel The Kite Runner, about growing up in the pre-Soviet era Afghanistan, into Chinese, in just 10 days. The translation has gone into 17 reprints since it appeared in 2006.

Li, who is translating Neale Donald Walsch's self-help book Friendship with God and F Scott Fitzgerald's early 20th-century classic about chasing the American Dream, The Great Gatsby, almost simultaneously, has also picked up a fair share of criticism along the way.

The Kite Runner has been pulled up for ironing out the cultural bumps into a silky smooth read, dropping politically contentious references and stripping words of their Islamic/religious connotations - translating the burqa as the Chinese equivalent of the long gown (chang pao), for example.