Unveiling Animal Agency: An Eco-Translational Approach to Realistic Wild Animal Stories

Chengcheng You

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Journal of Translation Studies ›› 2025, Vol. 9 ›› Issue (2) : 1-36.

Unveiling Animal Agency: An Eco-Translational Approach to Realistic Wild Animal Stories

Chengcheng You

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Abstract

Translating animal agency poses evolving challenges and opportunities for more nuanced ethical attunements with animal subjects, especially in light of Anthropocene realities and the ongoing shift from anthropocentric to post-anthropocentric ways of understanding the world. Drawing on ecologically informed frameworks such as “eco-translation,” “ecolinguistics,” and “narrative ethology,” this study examines the portrayals of animal behaviors, social mores, and family values in Chinese translations of Ernest Thompson Seton's collection of animal stories Wild Animals I Have Known (1898). Focusing on the interplay of anthropomorphic projections and animal agency in the original and its translations, this study argues for an eco-translational approach to similar works, particularly within the genre of realistic animal stories. This approach refrains from fabricating pseudopersonhood for animals as mere automatized human cultural constructs. Instead, it seeks to analytically unveil pre-existing animal agency encoded in the source text or extrapolate it from the genre's ethos. The study concludes with the potential strategies that emphasize the importance of unveiling animal agency as an indispensable component of eco-translation.

Key words

eco-translation / ecolinguistics / narrative ethology / animal agency / anthropomorphism

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Chengcheng You. Unveiling Animal Agency: An Eco-Translational Approach to Realistic Wild Animal Stories.Journal of Translation Studies 2025 , 9(2): 1-36

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