Abstract: Nils Göran David Malmqvist, the established Sinologist and permanent member of the Swedish Academy, is known not only for his large amounts of translation works, but also for his insightful ideas on translation, covering intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation. He classifies the translators of Chinese literature into three groups, each with their respective purposes. He thinks that translation is also a kind of academic pursuit and that interlingual translation is fundamentally impossible, yet possible to some extent. Malmqvist advocates that a translator, who plays different roles in the translating process, should choose the highly literary works to render and pay attention to the meaningful form of the text, the reader’s taste and expectation. He perceives translation as a kind of conversation between different subjects and the rendition of a text as the translation of a culture. His translation activities and thoughts on them bring us new understandings about and revelations on translating Chinese literature into other languages, which call for more studies from the academics in the field.