The Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban) plans to launch a worldwide program to offer translations of the "Five Classics", for the first time since the founding of the People's Republic of China. The first to come out will be the English translation, due in three and a half years. This will be followed by the French, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi and Malay translations, which will be based on both the English translation and the original text.

The "Five Classics" - The Book of Songs, The Book of History, The Book of Changes, The Book of Rites, and The Spring and Autumn Annals - form the main body of Confucian studies and have served as subjects for the imperial examination for centuries in ancient China.

Xu Lin, director of Hanban, says the existing English, French and German translations of the "Five Classics" were done almost 100 years ago, and are out of date and out of print.

The selected texts include 700,000 Chinese characters and the English translation is expected to have 1 million words, filling 2,500 pages.