Timothy Richard, a missionary of Baptists, translated Zhen Di’s Chinese translation sutra Da Chen Qi Xin Lun into English in 1894 and this version was published in 1907 by the Christian Literature Society. Following the first version by Suzuki, this full version elicited little attention. This paper, based on primary historical files, discusses how the book’s author, its content and the concept Zhen Ru were reconstructed under Ricard’s Theology. It discovers that, inspired by Beal’s Pseudo-Christian interpretation, Richard found Righteousness in the union of world religions from this book. This Righteousness is essentially what is needed in the building of the Kingdom of God. In his translation, he reconstructed Zhen Ru in the name of God and brought a totally new book to readers. His translation is the preparation for the building of the incoming Kingdom of God.

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.

This article re-contextualizes the historical developments of Chinese military interpreter training during the Second World War. Through the study of the Kunming- and Chongqing-based interpreting officer training programs in the 1940s, the entire training scheme is divided into three phases. Discussions of each phase revolve around key strands of education, including enrollment, curriculum, training methods, and faculty composition. It is argued that, despite some deficiencies, the wartime training practices actually marked the first developmental phase in translation and interpreting training in China in the twentieth century. They comprised large-scale curriculum-based institutional training practices, which, as a feature of twentieth-century Chinese translation history and education, merit further research. The program structure and curriculum design discussed in the article are of relevance to translation and interpreting education today, thus contributing to the understanding of interpreter/translator training and interpreting/translating during the second Sino-Japanese war.

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.

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 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.

Much has been written about the prominent British sinologists in the history of English translations of Chinese literature in the nineteenth century. It should be noted that the development of British sinology, including literary translation, in the nineteenth century was also marked by the active participation of a large number of foreign residents in China. Their contributions have not yet received sufficient attention. This paper examines the life and work of Alfred Lister (1842-1890) as a translator of Chinese literature who is still largely unnoticed. Since his arrival in Hong Kong in 1865, Lister had served in several offices in the colonial government, including Postmaster General and Treasurer. He had published actively in contemporary sinological journals, with a particular interest in translating Chinese literary works into English. With archival research and textual analysis, this paper examines his selection of source texts and his concepts and translation methods. It explores how the practice of literary translation had developed in the context of his colonial experience and the Chinese research environment in Hong Kong at the time. This paper brings new perspectives to our understanding of the history of English translations of Chinese literature in the nineteenth century.

Zhou Zuoren insisted on the right to choose the texts to be translated. However, the external influence cannot be neglected. Taking Zhou Zuoren’s translations in the The Short Story Magazine as an example, on one hand, his translation concepts profoundly influenced the editors of the magazine; on the other hand, Mao Dun and others also consciously made use of the influence of the Zhou brothers’ previous translations. Although they cooperated with each other in most cases, when it came to the choice and interpretation of a particular article, the struggles between Zhou Zuoren’s own interest and the magazine’s line were visible.

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.

This essay focuses on the spatiotemporal notion of liminality and the way it can be mapped onto translation processes and the role of the translator. The concept of liminality can be traced back to Arnold van Gennep’s (1960) rites of passage and their re-elaboration by Victor Turner (1967 and 1974). It has recently been theorized within the social sciences as a central concept that allows a redefinition of the relationship of structure and agency (Thomassen 2014; Szakolczai 2015). In postcolonial studies (Bhabha 2006) and translation studies, it has been frequently used as a synonym of the notions of in-betweenness and third space (Aammari 2017; Bery 2007; Inghilleri 2017; Johnston 2007). However, despite some common traits, liminality offers a more comprehensive and dynamic approach. The notion of liminality is, furthermore, connected to the spatial metaphors of the door (Simmel 1957), the threshold, the arcade (Benjamin 2002 and 2004) and the gate (Tawada 2003; Sakai 2011), which do not conceive of languages as isolated self-contained units but focus on a possible opening between systems whose character is otherwise left unspecified.

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.

In a descriptive approach for a specific study, this article aims to explore the existing translation beliefs, management, and practices of Hong Kong. It first reviews the literature on translation policy and summarizes certain key concepts for application. In the focus case, it is found that the overt bilingual language policy of Hong Kong does not lead to any explicit translation policy. In some other official statements, translation management and practices are mentioned. It carries out institutional bilingualism with bilingual mandatory translation at the official level. For the small percentage of ethnic minorities, mostly South Asians, the government has set up guidelines to provide daily life assistance at departmental levels, including translation and interpretation. Certain non-governmental organizations are also involved. This is a typical case of a “cross-portfolio policy-making” approach to translation policy. The study recommends explicitation of the language and translation policies, along with their rationale, and the integration of the translation policies for minority languages. The Hong Kong case study could serve as a reference for policymakers and researchers, while the application of key concepts helps build the methodology for analyzing translation policies elsewhere.

As a political novel that advocates violence against the Qing government by then revolutionists, Free Marriage brings severe criticism of the society to the fore. The novel, replete with strong political motivations, is under the guise of translation for two reasons: first, it can attract target readers due to the popularity of the translated works at that time; second, it can evade censorship from the authority. Translation is not an end but a means of “resistance” and even “engagement” for the pseudotranslators. Pseudotranslation is the quintessence and the most radical form of activism translation. By catering to the dominant ideology in society, the pseudotranslator brings the revolutionary or even subversive role of translation during transitional periods into full play.

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.

In early twentieth-century Hong Kong, the rendition of medical terminology in the translated detective stories of Chinese-language periodicals reflected translation as a touchstone of the early exchanges between Western and Chinese medical culture. Among them, the literary translation Qi Wang Hui (1906) is a case in point. In the Chinese version, the Western terms for medical instruments, drugs and diseases, among others, were inconsistently translated. Some of the terms were translated literally, with the original meaning largely preserved, whereas some others were translated using words from Traditional Chinese Medicine. Others were translated as Chinese referents of more general concepts. The different strategies for dealing with the translation of various terms reflected the unbalanced recognition of Western medical knowledge and technology in the Chinese cultural context.

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.

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.

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)

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.

No evidence has been found in existing literature that the word zhiyi (literal translation) has been used in ancient Chinese. It is also not common to see the combination of zhi and yi, which can be regarded as the abbreviation of “direct translation” — the understanding of “direct” always changes with the context. This kind of zhiyi is completely different from the translation term zhiyi we use nowadays. The modern Chinese word zhiyi (literal translation), opposite to yiyi (freetranslation), appeared no later than the beginning of the twentieth century. However, it was considered as an inadequate translation method then. Actually, zhiyi originated from Japanese. It was written in the form of Chinese character in Japanese, and could be found in many dictionaries from late Shogunate to early Meiji. Since Chinese and Japanese shared Chinese characters, zhiyi became a Chinese word easily by the way of “word loaning.” The “loaning” process was recorded in the notes left by Chinese students in Japan around the turn of the century, and the articles in Qingyi Newspaper and Xinmin Journal run by Liang Qichao in Japan.

Lefevere defines patronage as a force that may promote or hinder the reading, creation and rewriting of works, with a highlight that patronage is mostly a promoting rather than hindering force. As such, researchers on patronage of persons and institutions have predominantly focused on the former with a practical exclusion of the latter. This article, by putting the English translations of the sexual descriptions in Jin Ping Mei under scrutiny, attempts to tease out literary censorship’s dual patronage function of both hindering and promoting the production, publication, circulation and reception of the relevant texts. Despite the seeming ambivalence, the concurrence of the two opposite functions in the same patron actually reveals the hierarchical, dynamic and interactive nature of the patronage system.

Thomas Francis Wade (1818-1895) was a famous British diplomat and sinologist. On 2 June 1842, he arrived in Hong Kong as a lieutenant and then participated in the first Sino-British Opium War with the British 98th regiment. During his convalescence in Hong Kong, he taught himself the Chinese language and hoped to be “an international agent” (an official interpreter). In January 1846, he returned to Hong Kong and gave up his military rank to serve as a diplomatic interpreter. After working in Hong Kong for approximately six years, he left for London in March 1852. However, little research has been done on Wade as a diplomatic interpreter in Hong Kong. Academic attention, both Chinese and English alike, has been mostly paid to him as a diplomat or a sinologist only.
Based on a large volume of first-hand materials, the present article reconstructs Wade’s experience “as an international agent” in Hong Kong. By analyzing his translation of Peking Gazette, his study on the Chinese government and conditions, his translation of the twelfth chapter of the Hai-kwoh Tu Chi, and his study of the Chinese army, this paper shows that he actively adjusted the scope of his role as an international agent in accordance with the changes in the politico- diplomatic situation, thereby influencing the relationship between Britain and China. Casting light on the importance of diplomatic interpreters in shaping modern Sino-British relations, this article points out that Wade, as an interpreter, was actively involved in politico- diplomatic activities through translation and research while in Her Majesty’s service and, as an interpreter, had his own political, diplomatic, and cultural agenda.

The translation of the Chinese character yi ( 夷 ) as “barbarian” caused a myriad of issues between Britain and China during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When translating Chinese documents in 1861, Thomas Francis Wade (1818-1895) defended the use of the character by Qing officials and explained, “I incline to believe that the word barbarian was here introduced by mistake.” This was a unique occurrence. By comparing Wade’s various translations of yi, this article supplies ample examples of how the correlation between his various applications of yi coincided with the changing state of Sino-British relations. On the surface, his varying points of view appear contradictory. However, upon closer inspection, they are not inconsistent and were applied for the purpose of shaping Sino-British relations, as he adjusted the translation to coincide with the climate of Sino-British diplomatic relations. In addition, while being a diplomatic interpreter, he used the translations of yi as a bargaining chip to further political interests during negotiations. This further reflects the complexity of being a diplomat and interpreter overseeing Sino-British diplomacy.

The present study aims to investigate how far Taiwanese people’s postcolonial identities could be represented via comparing a Japanese novel, Orphan of Asia (1945), with its Chinese (2008) and English (2006) translations. The research methods include a comparative analysis of the Japanese source text (ST) and its Chinese and English target texts (TTs), followed by a cross-textual analysis of these Chinese and English TTs.
The key findings are firstly, compared with the Japanese ST and its Chinese and English TTs, more translation differences and problems were identified in the English TT, presenting different ways of expressing Taiwanese people’s colonial situations, which as a result may or may not successfully represent Taiwanese people’s postcolonial identities. Secondly, the present study shows that the translators’ ideological intervention may influence the representations of Taiwanese people’s postcolonial identities to some extent, pointing to the heterogeneity in postcolonial translation. Thirdly, the present study stresses the significance of using foreignization in postcolonial translation to potentially reshape the target readers’ world knowledge. For future translation research on postcolonial identities, the present study provides implications of the analysis of translators’ translation techniques related to ideological involvement.

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.

In 1952, Everyman’s Literature, a literary periodical, was established in Hong Kong. The present scholarship contends that the periodical was financially supported by the US, and the literary translations in the periodical were an inseparable part of the American translation scheme in the 1950s Hong Kong. In fact, Everyman’s Literature did not directly receive the financial support, therefore its translations were not political tools. Instead, the editor Huang Sicheng brilliantly orchestrated the translations to show and promote his literary ideas. Referring to the sources that have been barely broached, this article scrutinizes Huang’s reading history, explores his acquisition of the knowledge of literature, and further discusses the impact of his knowledge system on the choice of the translated texts in Everyman’s Literature. With the perspective of reading history, the paper hopes to open up a new analytical path for the study on the mainland literati in Hong Kong.

In the translation history of the Qing Code, George Jamieson used his translation to map a reform route that was neglected in Chinese legal history. Based on first-hand archival material, this article reconstructs the untrodden route by recovering Jamieson’s vision on the value of Qing family law in the new era. Having outlined the legal and social conditions that boosted his assurance, it proceeds to analyze the message he hoped to convey to Chinese lawmakers by probing his opposition to drastic changes and advocacy for gradual reform. In the face of an imminent legal reform, Jamieson attached importance to “selecting” and “adapting” those parts of foreign law that could accommodate native institutions. His dialogue with modern English law in translating Qing marriage law set a model in this regard.

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.

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.

As Cold War narratives swept across the world of letters in 1960s China, American literature was translated into Chinese for political rather than poetic reasons. One of the most prominent translated pieces was Jerome David Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951). This regimented Chinese version was circulated internally among high- class Chinese officials and scholars. By renarrating this novel into a “degenerate work” of the Beat Generation, Dong Hengxun 董衡巽 , along with other spokespersons for Chinese authorities, demonized the United States as an amoral nation, challenged the metanarrative of capitalist modernity, and legitimized its socialist counterpart. However, the translator Shi Xianrong 施咸榮 selectively appropriated clashing voices in his postscript to create a narrative battleground and thus implicitly renarrated The Catcher in the Rye from a degenerate work into a controversial one by highlighting its literary merit. The conflicting renarrations of the novel in question essentially epitomized a motley variety of contrasts: politics vs. poetics, the East vs. the West, domestic identity vs. foreign otherness, and, ultimately, socialist modernity vs. capitalist modernity. By weaving together various historical materials and drawing heavily on Social Narrative Theory, this case study contextualizes the translation, circulation, and criticism of The Catcher in the Rye in 1960s China and positions relevant renarrators within the stories that informed their discursive behaviors, thereby revealing the variable distance between said transcultural mediators and the dominant narratives of politics and poetics at that time.

No complete translation of Feng Menglong’s 馮夢龍 (1574-1646) famous trilogy of short stories Sanyan 三言 exists in Italian. However, over the last hundred years, various translators have been attempting to translate excerpts of Feng’s trilogy, with alternating results. This paper analyzes the existing Sanyan stories available in Italian.
Firstly, this paper tackles the pioneering period at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Feng’s huaben 話本 were first presented to an Italian audience, albeit in a heavily edited form. The earliest Italian versions of Sanyan stories were mostly rewritings and were heavily influenced by the preexisting foreign versions of the stories they chose to translate.
Secondly, after the Second World War, Feng appeared as the author of stories that included anthologies of Chinese literature, again some of which were still translated from other European languages (mostly English and German).
Thirdly, the decade of the 1980s was a period when Italian translators, mostly scholars of Chinese literature, decided systematically to translate from the original texts and produced accurate and readable versions, which are still used as references.
Fourthly, in the last decade, a new generation of Sinologists has undertaken the study of Sanyan, and their translations are mostly inserted inside of scholarly publications.
Finally, this paper shows how the approach to translating Feng has changed over the years, from a quasi-manipulation of the original stories to an extreme respect for the source material. At the same time, the need for a complete version of Sanyan in Italian is called into question at the end of the paper.