Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…Without revealing who translated what, which translation did you like the best? Obviously, I can’t compare to the originals. Two strikes me as oversimplified, but the original might be as well, so I prefer one. It seemed closer to the original, but that’s quite subjective from a great-distance point of view. What do you think? One and three are by Ken Liu and two is by Joel Martinsen, who’s since done several of Liu Cixin’s other works. I like all of them. I think I have a slight preference for Ken’s literary style. It might be because he’s also quite an accomplished writer of his original fiction. I do not like the prose in Chinese. Or I guess I wouldn’t say I actively dislike it; I just find it incredibly utilitarian. He’s clearly more interested in the ideas than he is in writing very beautiful, elegant, descriptive sentences. I think this comes through especially in his character work. Oh, let me ask you, what do you make of the non-Chinese characters and how they’re represented?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.