(Photo from Xinhua Daily)

A History of the Nanjing Massacre, an adaption of The Nanking Massacre: A Complete History published by Nanjing University Press in 2012, released its Arabic edition in September this year, becoming the ninth foreign-language version of the book in the past decade.

Edited by Professor Zhang Xianwen of Nanjing University, the original Chinese book was a landmark work, comprising 1.1 million Chinese characters and representing the most comprehensive research on the massacre's history conducted in China.

On the back cover of The Nanking Massacre: A Complete History, Dr. Yang Jinrong, a senior editor at Nanjing University Press and a historian, included the term "Nanjing Massacre" in six languages: English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, and Russian.

To make the content more accessible to a wider audience, Dr. Yang invited Professor Zhang and Professor Zhang Lianhong, director of the Nanjing Massacre Research Center at Nanjing Normal University, to condense the original book into a shorter version with 450,000 Chinese characters.

The English and Japanese editions of the book A History of the Nanjing Massacre were published in 2015, the same year Documents of the Nanjing Massacre from China were inscribed on the Memory of the World Register by UNESCO’s International Advisory Committee.

One of the English edition's translators, Michelle LeSourd, who studied at the Johns Hopkins University - Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies in the 1980s, immersed herself in the text for months, laying a solid foundation for subsequent multilingual translations.

Yin Shenglong, a Korean language teacher at Nanjing Normal University, completed the translation to Korean language with a heavy heart. After two years of efforts, the Korean edition was published in December 2017, coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre.

Following its publication, Korean and Chinese scholars organized academic seminars in both countries to discuss the book. Korean scholars noted that, despite previous translation of some works on the massacre into Korean, understanding of this history within Korean society remained limited. The Korean edition was considered a milestone in the book’s global dissemination.

As foreign translations of the book progressed, more translators from around the world joined the effort. Through collaboration across the publishing community, the book has been published in Polish, Spanish, Kazakh, Albanian, Hindi, Hebrew, and Arabic. The Hebrew edition, released in Israel in 2020, has been reprinted several times.

Regrettably, although the Japanese edition was published in 2015, its distribution in Japan has faced significant obstacles.