[1] Jin was born in Wuxing County (now Huzhou), Zhejiang, in September 1921.
After graduating from National Southwestern Associated University in 1945, he worked as a translator in the U.S. News Office in China.
Jin's translation career commenced when, in collaboration with British poet Robert Payne, he began to translate Shen Congwen's collection of stories, The Chinese Earth, into English and had it published in Britain in 1947.
[2] In 1978, at the invitation of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, he began translating James Joyce's famous novel Ulysses.
[4] In 2005, Jin became the first Asian to be conferred with an honorable membership in the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association (ITIA).