A Noble Family – The First English Translation of a Chinese Classic

A Substack post that includes four preview chapters from the first full English translation of Zhang Henshui’s The Story of a Noble Family, now out as an ebook on Kobo. The entire project was built and run locally on a Mac Studio (M2 Ultra, 192 GB RAM) using Python scripts with Ollama-served Llama 3 70B to segment and translate the original 1920s Chinese text. The pipeline consists of regex chapter parsing, style-aware prompting, and offline batch translation.