Yang Xianyi, a translator renowned for his skill at rendering both classic and contemporary Chinese literature into English, died Monday in Beijing. He was 94.

His death was announced by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.

Yang, who was given a lifetime achievement award in September by the Translators’ Association of China, was widely regarded as the greatest translator of 20th- century China.

Working for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing and later for his own company, Panda Books, he translated scores of major Chinese works, written from the 10th century to the present, into English, usually in collaboration with his wife, Gladys, who died in 1999. He also translated works by George Bernard Shaw and other English-language writers into Chinese.

Yang Xianyi was born on Jan. 10, 1915, into a banking family in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. After studying at a missionary school, he enrolled at Merton College, Oxford, in 1934 to study classical languages and literature.

Three years later, he met Gladys Margaret Taylor, the Beijing-born daughter of a British missionary, who was studying French literature at Oxford and later became the first person to obtain a degree in Chinese literature there.

The couple began working together as translators and, despite opposition from their families, married in China in 1940.