On 20th April, the 2019 Boku & Qianjiang Evening News Spring Reading Festival was held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. It was directed by Zhejiang Daily Press Group and Zhejiang Publishing United Group while sponsored by Qianjiang Evening News and Zhejiang Xinhua Bookstore Group. First, a list of 60 quality books was selected through the recommendation by major publishers, bookstores and readers, and professor Hu’s translation work Ideas: From Fire to Freud was in the list. Then after tens of thousands of readers’ voting and rounds of judges’ evaluating, professor Hu was awarded the Golden Translator of 2019. The award speech emphasized that Reading the translation work by professor Hu enabled more people to understand the secret of why human beings had developed to what we were today. She opened a new window for the Chinese readers to look at world history.
The book Ideas: From Fire to Freud was written by English scholar Peter Watson. As an encyclopedic masterpiece, it provides an overview of the world’s development in ideas and cultures from the time when human beings were able to walk and make a fire to the early 20th century. Out of love and pursuit of the knowledge and ideas which can best inspire human minds and reflect the human spiritual life, professor Hu spent two years translating this two-volume philanthropic book of appropriately one million words, devotedly and independently.
The book was well received after it was published in January 2018. It was praised as “A Book Full of Ideas” by the Phoenix New Media and highly recommended by China Reading Weekly, China Publishers, Si Nan Literary Journal, Jiemian News and other media publications. In addition, it was selected into “the Best Ten Book of 2018” by Yilin Press and “the Best 30 Books of 2018 in China” by the Publishers Association of China.
