三人行，必有我师(焉)

I have a weird little question on translation choices that I hope somebody here can answer for me about grammar.

I've seen some c-novels translated in present tense and some in past tense and I've wondered if there is something in the Chinese that makes one tense more accurate than the other, or if it's the translator's English tense preference.

I know that Chinese doesn't have tenses the way Indo-European languages do, but for Chinese speakers, does English present tense accurately reflect the feel of the narration in Chinese? While reading Chinese does one mentally suspend defining "past" while reading until a specific time marker indicates past action, so that everything mentally takes place in the "present" until told otherwise? Or is it like the traditional English "narrative past" that serves as a neutral tense for story-telling?

For example, how in Chinese would you distinguish between:

'Zhao Yunlan drives to the university.' (narrative present)

'Zhao Yunlan drove to the university.' (narrative past)

'Zhao Yunlan says to Shen Wei that he drove to the university.' (narrative present relating a past action)

'Zhao Yunlan said to Shen Wei that he drove to the university.' (narrative past relating a past action)

And just to be difficult: 'Zhu Hong suspects that Zhao Yunlan said to Shen Wei that he drove to the university, and then he takes/took him there.' (narrative present relating past actions at 2 different times)

Are all these distinctions in English unnecessary in Chinese?