This essay proposes complexity and computational network analysis as fitting paradigm and methodology for studying contemporary literary translators’ agency. Grounded in the rhizomatic structure of networks, this approach unearths the importance of translation-based literary barters for the robustness and stability of a translation sub-system, in our case the sub-system of contemporary poetry translation from American and Canadian English into Romanian. Using a mixed- method approach that combines close reading (qualitative analysis) and distant reading (quantitative analysis), the research shows that translators possess an essentially connective mind and that their own interests and network of personal connections are salient in starting and maintaining a substantial exchange of inter-cultural transfers in a transnational context. Complexity thinking provides the premises for demonstrating that translation is highly sensitive to its initial conditions of production, thus is reliant on translators, and the computational network analyses prove consequential for documenting the role of translators in initiating and carrying out literary translation projects.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work was regularly translated into Chinese despite the complexity of the medical terminology that permeates his work. This article considers how references in the Sherlock Holmes stories were rendered in translations published in 1916, thereby bridging the gap between Western and Chinese medical traditions. In particular, it considers how Western medical diagnoses and procedures were grafted onto existing concepts in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) through analysis of the translation methods used. It reflects on the need to make such medical references accessible to non-specialist readers in order to not impede their reading experience. By comparing early and later translations, the article assesses the extent to which Western medicine (WM) permeates Chinese culture at different points in twentieth century history.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the imagined community created when student translators envisage a target reader for whom they are translating and to highlight pedagogical implications for developing awareness of language and culture in the second language (L2) classroom context. As mediators between source and target culture, language learners dealing with translation, i.e., translation studies students who are also L2 learners of at least one of the languages in the language pair, may also have a role in an imagined community—they have an imagined or implied target reader for whom they are translating, and serve their roles as communicators between the imagined source and target communities. They make connections and fill in the gaps that may be found during the translation of a text from one language and culture to another.
This paper looks at the student contemplations during the process of translation in an imagined community they may imagine themselves to be in. Five Korean into English translation classes were offered to students at a university in Seoul, South Korea. Presenting qualitative excerpts from the data, this paper discusses the imagined community painted by the learners during their process of translation, and how they negotiate the identities of the target audience members with whom they are aiming to communicate.

It is generally agreed that the translation of children’s literature is an under-researched area. With only three books focusing on the subject, even rarer is the research on children’s literature in China, and none of which dwells on the translation of American children’s literature in modern China, not to mention the research on the translation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s children’s literature. Yet Hawthorne’s children’s literature enjoyed a wide circulation in Republican China (1912-1949), which even overshadowed the translation of his often-quoted classics. Based on André Lefevere’s rewriting theory, this article argues that the translation of Hawthorne’s children’s literature was initiated in late Qing when the dominant culture changed its view of children and the importance of children’s education. But it also benefited from ideological advocacy for child-orientation and from the poetic urgency for the establishment of children’s literature in China. The translation, supported by various forms of patronage, ushered in a period of prosperity in the May Fourth era and greatly affected the creation of children’s literature in China as an independent category. Then, confronted with the nationwide political agenda of the impending war, the translation of Hawthorne’s children’s literature lost its impetus beginning in the late 1930s, although there were some translations or retranslations of Hawthorne’s famous fairy tales sporadically in the 1940s.

威妥瑪（ThomasFrancisWade,1818-1895）是英國著名外交官和漢學家。1842年6月2日,身為中尉的他抵達香港,隨英軍第98軍團參與中英第一次鴉片戰爭。在香港休整期間,自學中文,並希望成為「一名國際代理人」,即官方譯員。1846年1月,他再次來到香港,並放棄軍銜,擔任外交譯員。直到1852年3月離開,他在香港工作長達六年之久。不過,他在香港擔任譯員的這段經歷幾乎被學界所忽視,大多數中外學者都只處理他的外交官身份和漢學家身份。
本文通過分析大量原始資料—主要為英國外交部檔案,重構威妥瑪在香港「作為一名國際代理人」的經歷。通過分析他翻譯《京報》、研究中國政府和國情、翻譯《海國圖志》的日本篇以及研究中國軍隊,展現他根據政治、外交形勢的變化,主動調整「代理」的身份和範圍,從而影響兩國之間的關係。本文指出,威妥瑪作為「國際代理人」,不僅處理語言文字工作,更積極介入政治、外交,並有自己的政治、外交、文化立場;在「為女王陛下服務」這個大的框架下,藉翻譯和研究等活動,為國家之間的政治、外交利益進行「代理」,足見外交譯員在近代中英政治、外交上所扮演的重要角色。

周作人在翻譯選目上較為自主,但外部影響亦不容小覷。在為《小 說月報》翻譯的過程中,一方面,他對外國文學的譯介理念深刻影 響著該刊的編輯者,另一方面,沈雁冰等人也有意識要利用周氏兄 弟以往的譯介實績和文壇影響力,從而積極向二人約稿。但是大方 向一致的背後,在對具體篇目的取捨及闡釋上仍可看到周作人自身 趣味與刊物路線之間的博弈關係。

This review provides a critical review of Chunshen Zhu’s monograph, Fathoming Translation as Discursive Experience: Theorization and Application (2021). Zhu aims to develop a “positive mode of translation studies” through his Structure of Meaning (SOM) model, which conceptualizes the making of meaning across three dimensions— compositional, interactional, and experiential. However, this review argues that SOM presents an overly static and idealized view of the translation process that neglects the potential for communicative failure and experimental translation practices.
Drawing on theories from Derrida, Bakhtin, Kristeva, Barthes, Massumi and Robinson, the review identifies several limitations in Zhu’s approach. It argues SOM assumes a metaphysical ontology of fixed authorial intentions that fails to account for the iterable and disseminated nature of textual meaning. Communication is presented as certain rather than acknowledging factors like double reading and the uncontrollability of effects. The model also imposes artificial separations between translation dimensions that obscure their interdependent, performative nature.
The review then considers alternative perspectives that could address these issues, such as conceptualizing translation as iterated meaning-making through the relay of texts’ trace elements. I also examine how recognizing the “death of the author” and the intertextual constitution of texts undermines claims to intrinsic intentions. The importance of embracing communicative instability and experimental practices is highlighted.
While acknowledging that SOM provides a model of normative translation, I argue that Zhu’s static structuralism neglects the productive dynamism of dialogical, performative, and experimental approaches. I aim to prompt revision of rigid ontological assumptions and consideration of translation’s social enactment through heteronymous narrativity. The increasingly narrow specialization of translation studies has recently been recognized as a serious problem. How can anyone possibly understand the field as a whole, when so many scholars are deploying research methodologies that baffle almost everyone else?
While this reviewer does not have a solution to those problems, Chunshen Zhu, in his Fathoming Translation as Discursive Experience: Theorization and Application (hereinafter referred to as Fathoming Translation), claims to. Zhu’s solution is to delineate “a positive mode of translation studies” (15), or positive translation studies for short, which according to him is “explorative, descriptive, analytical, explanatory, and predicative rather than prescriptive” (16), with the wish to build an interdisciplinary network among linguistics, literature, culture, sociology, etc. so as to provide a coherent theoretical model for translation studies. By framing the making of meaning into a three-dimensional structure (SOM, or structure of meaning) before applying it to discursive experience, exploring the concept of Unit of Translation (UT), and ultimately fathoming translation “as cross-cultural text-sign production” (23), Zhu describes his positive translation studies thus: It describes and analyzes translation as a phenomenon of cross-lingual and cross-cultural meaning making, putting forward hypotheses about it in terms of norms (i.e., “normal” rather than “normative” practices) and explaining their workings in the production, operation, and reception of a translation, during which meaning is realized as discursive experience triggered by the text and undergone by the reader in a particular social situation. (15)

1894年,英國浸禮會傳教士李提摩太英譯了真諦漢譯本《大乘起信論》,並於1907年由上海廣學會出版。此譯本是繼日本學者鈴木大拙出版的譯本以來的第二個全譯本,卻沒能引起學界的足夠重視。本文基於一手史料,分析了此論的作者、整體內容以及核心概念「真如」在李氏的神學思想體系裡通過其英譯本如何再次重構與呈現。本研究的發現如下：李氏受到英國傳教士比爾「偽基督論」的啟示,從此論構建出世界宗教聯合後所獲得的「正義」,而這種正義正是上帝國的主要特徵,也是上帝國得以建立的前提。為充分證明並散播此構想,他通過譯本將原文的「真如」概念以上帝之名義重構,為讀者呈現解讀後不同於鈴木的全新譯本,為其建立上帝國的抱負作了思想準備。

During the Cold War, Hong Kong occupied a pivotal role as a bridge between the Free World and the Communist World, making it crucial for the United States (U.S.) to counter the spread of communist ideologies. Literary translation emerged as a significant avenue for advancing U.S. foreign-policy objectives by winning over the hearts and minds of audiences worldwide. Consequently, the prevalence of U.S.- commissioned literary translations in Hong Kong became a crucial aspect of Cold War dynamics. Existing scholarly research has primarily focused on the financial support provided by the U.S. to intellectuals involved in literary translations, while overlooking the nuanced perspectives and attitudes of these intellectuals toward such funding. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the attitudes and reactions of local intellectuals towards financial assistance from the U.S., using Platitude Press (Renren chubanshe 人人出版社) as a case study. It argues that the relationship between the U.S. and local intellectuals during the Cold War era was not one-sided but rather interactive, leading to a more complex and multifaceted history of Cold War activities in Hong Kong.

The taking of a critical stance toward particular translations has a long history in translation criticism, but the position against translation itself has been studied only piecemeal and without an eye to the commonalities and divergencies in the various stances that motivate it or to its divergent nomenclature. “Resistance to translation” is often evoked as a talisman of a text’s untranslatability (e.g., Apter 2013), but it can denote a translatorial opposition: refusing to translate or else translating subversively. The stance against translation may be born of various resistances: feminist, indigenist, postcolonial, or anthropological. To Robinson’s (1996) translation as taboo (owing to the ontological and theological status of the source), we can add aesthetic objections registered by those against translation. Non-translation, as a wholesale policy or a philosophy, is sometimes absolute. I briefly catalog some forms of anti-translation poetics: pseudotranslation, displacement, accentedness, untranslation, intradução, detranslation, counter-translation, distranslation, dystranslation, hypertranslation, mistranslation, transcreation, translelation, non-translation, partial translation and half-translation, literary machine translation, rhizomatic translation, and transtranslation. Critical linguistic-ideological stances and subversions of translation proper, these projects or platforms are meant to produce or champion everything from censure or opacity, to reinscription (“counter-translation”) or greater clarity of the source.

馬若瑟是法國耶穌會士,康熙年間抵華,晚年遭雍正流放於廣州。 他在此地法譯了八首《詩經》中的詩,1735 年獲杜赫德收編於《中華 帝國全志》之中,是為《詩經》西傳之始。馬若赫所譯《詩經》八首, 全都出自〈雅〉與〈頌〉,獨缺〈國風〉,顯示馬若瑟意非抒情文學, 重點全在聖王與王治之上。他的翻譯詮解,是典型的索隱派手法, 帶有強烈的天主教義的暗示。本文勾稽所隱,揣度馬若瑟的翻譯關 懷,讓我們一窺早期《詩經》歐譯和《聖經》之間的聯繫。

Adopting the approach of conceptualizing translation with metaphors, this study metaphorizes the Macau News 澳門新聞紙 as the Qing Empire’s imperial gaze. The Macau News is a translation project initiated and organized by Lin Zexu 林則徐 , who was designated by the Daoguang Emperor 道光帝 as an imperial envoy to stem the tide of opium circulating in Canton in 1839. Lin conducted this project to learn about Britain for use in instituting countermeasures to the opium trade. In this process, Lin as well as the Qing government behind him started to look at the world seriously; for this reason, Lin was dubbed “the first person of modern China to gaze at the world.” Such a gaze relied largely on Lin’s translational and intercultural practices and may represent a general way of how the Qing looked at the foreign. To examine this looking relation, the Macau News as one of Lin’s translation projects is investigated with the aid of the existing scholarship of the gaze. Moreover, exemplified by the case study of the Macau News, the gaze is proven of potential to be integrated into translation studies.

Among the most important roles of theory in the humanities is the creation of fresh perspectives. Probing a new angle defamiliarises the familiar and leads to novel questions. My paper explores the potential offered by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems for an understanding of translation in its social and historical context. The theory is abstract and general, and we need to begin by introducing some of its basic concepts and terms (communication; code; programme; autopoiesis; operational closure; differentiation; structural coupling; observation and second-order observation). I then go on to survey individual aspects of translation that can be redescribed in social systems terms. The paper defines translation as proxy and resemblance, addresses the internal differentiation of translation in the modern world, explains the idea of the form of translation and the significance of intertextuality in this regard, casts translation as second-order observation, and suggests ways in which social systems theory can focus attention with reference to translation history.

Recently, Chinese science fiction literature seems to have gained unprecedented visibility in Western countries, since it is translated in many Western languages, in particular in English. The question of translation of this literature seems therefore to be a topical issue with several potential difficulties, such as the translation of neologisms and coined words, as well as that of the resulting encyclopedias (Eco; Saint-Gelais) and paradigms (Angenot). Hence, this paper aims to discuss the difficulties and possibilities of recreating Chinese written neologisms and coined words to Western alphabetic languages.

This paper offers a critical analysis of the reinterpretation of female authority in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice by exploring the role of Portia and her transformation in early Chinese translations. First, it provides a brief survey of recent interpretations of Portia’s role in The Merchant to familiarize the reader with current debates and the different readings. The objective is to present a concrete understanding of Shakespeare’s intentions regarding sexual dynamics in order to assess how these elements were recontextualized in Chinese translations for specific cultural purposes. Next, the paper examines the first Chinese translations of the play to determine how faithfully they preserved the original portrayal of female characters. Finally, this paper analyzes Bao Tianxiao’s adaptation, The Lawyeress, considering how deviations from Shakespeare’s original text reflected evolving attitudes toward sexual equality in early twentieth century China and contributed to the creation of a uniquely feminist reading of Portia’s character.

The Taiwanese government has formulated a policy to develop the society to be bilingual (Chinese and English), and all information relevant to foreigners’ lives should be available in English. This descriptive study aims to discuss the feasibility of the policy and make recommendations from the perspectives of institutional translation and translation policy, with special reference to translation quality control. The European Commission is taken as a reference case. In the first part, the documentation method is employed. In the second, the article samples eighteen websites of the central government of Taiwan for bilingualization in checking with the performance indicator set in the Blueprint of the policy as a comparative content analysis. Two bilingual texts from two websites are selected to evaluate the translation quality using genre analysis and the functionalist approach. Given the future volume and scale of government translation, more resources are called for, while the professionalization of the industry and a quality assurance (QA) system are recommended.

This paper examines translations and corresponding paratexts published by the Australian academic Geremie Barmé ( 白杰明) under the banner of “New Sinology” in 2022. It starts by tracing the origins of New Sinology, an activist approach to studying and interacting with greater China that Barmé proposed in 2005 and which Duncan Campbell and Edward McDonald helped define in China Heritage Quarterly (2005- 2012) and elsewhere. Barmé’s background as an eyewitness to the Cultural Revolution and his associations with Chinese dissidents are discussed as factors contributing to the development of New Sinology, as is the discipline’s locus in Australia and New Zealand, two English speaking countries adjacent to the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s geographic sphere of power. This paper subsequently examines Barmé’s translation efforts in 2022, a year of tumult in the PRC. Barmé’s translations of a Chinese expatriate’s reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Shanghainese man’s furious reaction to the COVID-19 lockdown, and overseas Chinese students’ reactions to the Beijing Sitong Bridge Incident, A4 Revolution, and Ürümqi apartment block fire are examined alongside the extensive contextualizing writings Barmé attaches to these translations. Informed by the writings of Mona Baker and Maria Tymoczko, this paper finds that Barmé’s translations are framed so as to weave translated voices into a narrative of intellectual resistance spanning centuries of Chinese history and discusses the implications of this approach. The article ends with an attempt to use a novel metaphor inspired by sampling-based music production to better understand the nature of activist translation.

This article intends to investigate how The Wizard of Oz was introduced, translated, and retranslated in China from the 1920s to the 1970s. Inspired by the historical archives mostly from Shenbao 申報, this paper firstly delineates the early acceptance of the Oz story by revealing how it was introduced, synopsized, and advertised in China between the 1920s and the 1940s. In this part, the novel’s early translation versions are investigated, with a particular focus on its title translation—“Lüye xianzong 綠野仙蹤,” to illustrate an initial acceptance of the novel as a story about gods and spirits. In the second part, as the sociopolitical context underwent major changes after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the translation of the novel was required to conform to the prevailing socialist realist tenets, and the novel was reinterpreted, retranslated, and reshaped as a piece of socialist realist children’s literature. This part concentrates on a comparative reading of Chen Bochui’s 陳伯吹 three translations (published sequentially in 1942-1943, 1953, and 1979). In investigating the translation history of The Wizard of Oz in China in the given period, this study suggests the nature of (re)translation as a complex process with multiple mediating forces.

Metaphor translation has been a matter of concern in translation studies because its interlinguistic transfer can be impeded by cross-cultural and crosslinguistic differences. Since the inception of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which focuses on the conceptual structure of metaphorical language, a range of studies have emerged to investigate metaphor translation from a cognitive perspective, presenting an eclectic mix of research questions and methodologies. This paper is targeted at illustrating what the cognitive approach has offered to translation studies by providing a critical overview of recent research in metaphor translation from a cognitive perspective. It is pointed out that cognitive theory can get to the heart of metaphor, an essential cognitive device for meaning-making, as well as translation, a cognitive activity. Illustrations from the literature show that a cognitive approach can account for in-depth conceptual transfer in the analysis of product- and process-oriented metaphor translation. The cognitive approach also provides important insights into translation as cross- cultural communication by offering a redefinition of culture. Within this context, the paper provides multilingual illustrations while paying special attention to translation between culturally-distant languages, e.g., English-Chinese and French-Chinese translation. Lastly, it is argued that there is potential in combining cognitive theory with translation theories such as Descriptive Translation Studies and the Interpretive Theory of Translation.

The YouTube Shakespeare phenomenon has been addressed in several studies including those by Christy Desmet (2009, 2014) and Stephen O’Neill (2014, 2015). This paper builds on their work to examine closely the visual, aesthetic and aural strategies of a YouTube video that seeks to make Shakespeare’s As You Like It more accessible to a group of Bengali-speaking students in small town West Bengal, India. The paper examines (a) the means by which the video creator works to activate prior knowledge in his target viewers, (b) the consequent degree of cognitive success he appears to have achieved in terms of summary and explanation, and (c) this video not just as a teaching tool, but as a piece of creative remediation in its own right, and an original contribution to YouTube Shakespeare. The easy access to the visual dimensions of the global popular afforded by immersion in a digital environment both necessitates and enables more flexible and innovative approaches to bringing alive the sometimes archaic language in canonical literary texts, in this case, Shakespeare’s plays. The paper demonstrates how the video allows the creator to harness the capabilities of one of YouTube’s key pedagogical affordances: the digital image, in conjunction with the site’s potent play and gaming possibilities, as well as the sense of community in shared space that it fosters in regular users. The creator’s deployment of images is apparently idiosyncratic; but these images are culled from a wide variety of online loci that are particularly relevant, comprehensible, and attractive to the demographic he addresses. This strategy enables him to use the exciting possibilities of play, exploration, and cross-cultural connection to engage students effectively in a text recognized as challenging in the Indian context. A related broader argument made here pertains to the role of such digital videos in the shaping of the Global Shakespeare that scholars such as Alexa Huang have highlighted in the last decade. Teaching/explainer videos like the one analyzed in detail here, which combine the exoticism and excitement of globally sourced digital images and the youthful power of play with specific local references and an accessible vernacular voiceover can make a crucial contribution towards reshaping a new generation of glocal non-Anglophone iterations of Shakespeare.

While in-between knowledge has proved to be vital for the growth of translation studies, the actual and potential influence of translation theory on other disciplines has received little attention. Its contribution to digital humanities, for example, has been considered mostly in relation to the use of translation as a tool to disseminate knowledge at research events. Although in recent years digital humanities has shown increased interest in languages and linguistic diversity, its techno- linguistic foundations remain limited to English.
Translation supplies digital humanities with an interesting epistemo-methodological problem that challenges monocultural epistemologies in text computing. While distant reading in one language is relatively straightforward, computation across languages faces many challenges, including Anglophone bias, economies of scale, blackboxes, and lack of phenomenological depth. If we can solve these problems, disrupting monolingual practices in knowledge production would be one of many benefits of cross-linguistic computation.
In this paper, I will discuss the affordances of translation by drawing on my ongoing research, including the DRaL (Distant Reading across Languages) project which began with the concerns of how to make digital research epistemologies more inclusive of and more open to languages other than English.

全面抗日戰爭時期的中國戰場是第二次世界大戰暨世界反法西斯戰 爭中不可或缺的「東方主戰場」。抗戰時期由國民政府主導的軍事 譯員訓練班是一項旨在配合援華盟軍對日作戰的創舉,亦是抗戰時 期中國翻譯教育的一個縮影。1941 至 1945 年間國民政府軍委會在 昆明和重慶等地通過徵調或招考,陸續培養了四千餘名英語譯員。 他們大多是來自各高等院校的大學生或是英語較好的公職人員,通 過兩至三個月不等的軍事英語和通譯業務培訓後,分配至中緬印戰 區的美軍機關和戰爭前線任「翻譯官」,為抗戰勝利做出過不可磨 滅的貢獻。本文以國民政府軍事譯員訓練班為研究對象,通過梳理 戰時譯員教育的創辦與培養歷程,旨在回溯抗戰時期中國翻譯教育 發展的歷史經緯,探析影響戰爭中語言教育的深層次社會文化因 素,力求為譯學界重讀二十世紀中國翻譯教育史上的特殊一頁,提 供一些可供鑒取的歷史經驗與文化哲思。

In 1886, Li Ruqian 黎汝謙 (1852-1909) and Cai Guozhao 蔡國昭 (dates unknown) translated Washington Irving’s renowned biography of George Washington (1732-1799), which appeared under the title Huashengdun quanzhuan 華盛頓全傳 (A Complete Biography of Washington). It was the first Chinese translation of a biography about George Washington. The translation proved to be a valuable source of information for Chinese readers in the nineteenth century, as it covered the American Revolutionary War and the founding of the Republic, providing insights into American history and politics.
Through the Li and Cai translation, this paper aims to explore how Chinese intellectuals understood and imagined the nature of a modern state during the late nineteenth century. The analysis will be contextualized through a discussion of sovereignty in the history of the interaction between China and Euro-American countries. As Qing China’s foreign relations differed from the Westphalian system of sovereignty featured by the Western “family of nations,” the concept of sovereignty was understood inconsistently. In their interpretation of Western forms of sovereignty, the Chinese translators employed terms such as zizhu 自主 (self-governance), junzhu 君主 (absolute monarchy), minzhu 民主 (republic), and yihui 議會 (parliament), echoing what Henry Wheaton (1785-1848) referred to as “external sovereignty” and “internal sovereignty.” This paper will analyze these terms to uncover changing Chinese perceptions of sovereignty and evaluate their impact on how Chinese intellectuals envisioned a modern state.
The primary approach adopted in this analysis is back translation, which draws on Max Huang’s (2008) work and comparative close reading, enabling a nuanced examination of the differences and contingencies in the meanings of concepts between Western and Chinese contexts. Ultimately, this paper will contribute to our understanding of the political landscape as conceptualized by Chinese intellectuals before the peak of Japanese influence in the early twentieth century.