Eric R Stone is an American journalist and translator operating from Taipei, Taiwan. He’s lived and worked as a full-time freelancer in Taiwan for over a decade, and has also traveled extensively in China and Japan.

As a translator, he specializes in the dense and abstruse – politics, history, philosophy, and ancient Chinese literature (the “Classical Chinese” language).

As a journalist, he utilizes his news expertise, foreign language skills, and local savvy (and contacts) to shine a light on the subtle nuances of all things Taiwan and cross-strait politics.

Eric began freelancing fulltime in 2015, and fully transitioned to direct-client work in 2017. 

From 2017 to 2018, he provided high-confidentiality, fast-turnaround translations of news features about human rights violations in China – including instances of religious persecution, torture, corruption, and accounts of the Uighur concentration camps – for an organization called CANAAN, which were published in the magazine Bitter Winter.

Since 2019, he has been translating ancient Chinese texts and modern commentaries for Buddhist and Taoist organizations in Taiwan and Singapore, including four books: Happiness & Suffering, Tao Te Ching: Wondrous Revelations, The Secret of Chan, and Emptiness Energy.

Eric’s main (or at least most time-consuming) hobby is writing and running Dungeons & Dragons 5e adventures in Mandarin for his Taiwanese friends. Recently, he has been using his knowledge of ancient Chinese literature to develop and test his own tabletop roleplaying game (TRPG) based on the bestiary of the Mountain-Sea Classic (山海經) and the military strategy principles of Sun Tzu’s Art of War (孫子兵法) – which, if he ever publishes, will include his own English translations of both texts.