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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After the failure of the 1898 Hundred Days’ Reform, Kang Youwei fled overseas under intense pursuit by the Qing authorities, continually seeking foreign military intervention to support his Royalist Movement (Qinwang Movement). In order to obtain British support, Kang, who lacked proficiency in English, traveled to London accompanied by his British interpreter, Chen Enrong (Claude Ley Kum). During Kang’s subsequent period of sojourn on the Coal Island, Chen remained briefly at his side before returning to Hong Kong. Existing scholarship has overlooked this “unusual” interpreter during Kang Youwei’s overseas exile. The absence of research on his role and motivations has prevented a proper understanding of his function within Kang’s overseas activities, leaving the historical traces surrounding him largely unexplored. With the emergence of new archival materials, however, this interpreter has begun to reappear from the shadows of history. Drawing primarily on telegrams and press reports preserved in the Hong Kong Public Records Office, the Hong Kong Public Libraries Digital Collections, and other open-access repositories, this article reconstructs the life of Chen and examines the multiple identities he embodied while serving at Kang’s side. It analyzes Chen’s motives for interpreting on Kang’s behalf as a representative for Ho Tung. By interrogating the role of this interpreter, the study unearths the divergent agendas and conflicting stances held by the Hong Kong business community and exiled politicians during this British expedition. Ultimately, it seeks to draw scholarly attention to the often-overlooked interpreters accompanying Kang Youwei during his years in exile, thereby stimulating further academic inquiry into the multifaceted translation phenomena within the Royalist Movement.

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.

This essay discusses the Amadis in Translation digital project (http://amadis.newtfire.org), which applies TEI XML encoding to Robert Southey’s 1806 translation Amadis of Gaul, comparing it to Southey’s source, the 1547 Sevilla edition of Garci Rodríquez de Montalvo’s Amadís de Gaula. The project uses computational methods to align the source at the clause level rather than word-by-word, reflecting the radical compressions and changes Southey made to the source. The essay uses the alignment tables generated by the project to assess Southey’s use of emotion in a set of sample chapters. Contrary to what the aesthetics of the Romantic era might have led us to believe, the data show that Southey dampened the use of emotion in the source text, potentially for reasons of taste or national and cultural identity. Our digital project illustrates how computational analysis of translations can revise commonsense predictions about texts and make comparisons between translations precise and quantifiable.

Generative AI models face a fundamental limitation when translating specialized terminology in low-resource language pairs: highly specialized vocabulary appears too infrequently in training corpora. This paper addresses this problem by proposing a hybrid framework that combines computational lexicography with neural machine translation to resolve systematic terminological inconsistencies. The approach implements a four-stage automated extraction pipeline: dictionary-based matching, phonetic similarity analysis, statistical significance detection, and proper noun resolution. Following expert validation, these four stages construct a metadata-rich terminological database. The database supports a two-stage translation system: first, standard neural fine-tuning handles style and syntax, followed by automated post-processing based on metadata (denomination, tradition, period) to achieve terminological control. In tests on biblical translation from ancient languages to Chinese (Hebrew, Greek, Latin), the system achieved 1.13× to 1.68× improvements in terminology coverage over dictionary baselines. Rather than competing with commercial large language models, this framework proposes a complementary approach: metadata-driven terminological control addresses systematic gaps that current models cannot resolve. Such methodology could be integrated directly into future model training or inference pipelines. The modular architecture could extend to other specialized domains with similar characteristics: limited parallel corpora and high terminological variability, including legal, medical, and technical fields.

This paper presents a case study of the English translation of Li Juan's 李娟 narrative nonfiction Dong Mu Chang 冬牧場. Through highlighting the translational and ethnographic characteristics of the original Chinese text, it posits that Li assumes the dual role of a translator and an ethnographer in her writing of Dong Mu Chang and that translating the book is essentially a meta-translational endeavor. Drawing upon the widely recognized narrative concept of the implied author, the paper makes a comparison between the English translation of Dong Mu Chang and its original Chinese version and has discovered that the English translation features an implied author with a more pronounced image of an ethnographer, a manifestation attributed to a succession of paratextual interventions that can be regarded as a strategic approach adopted by the translators to augment the ethnographic essence of the book. This study underscores the richness and complexity of Dong Mu Chang as a dynamic object of translation and reveals the potential challenges involved in translating narrative nonfiction with ethnographic characteristics, giving prominence to the narrative concept of the implied author. It establishes an epistemologically important case for narrative nonfiction translation research and hopefully offers implications for the practice of narrative nonfiction translation as well.

The field of expertise studies in cognitive psychology proposes that expert performance in cognitive skill domains such as chess, computer programming, or systems analysis is enabled by distinctive cognitive resources that allow “consistently superior performance on a specified set of representative tasks for the domain that can be administered to any subject” (Ericsson and Charness 1997). These resources are accumulated within the framework of deliberate practice, engagement in regular activities that are specially designed to improve performance. The cognitive resources that underlie expertise arise from the operation of pattern recognition, problem representation, “chunking”, schematization and knowledge proceduralization processes on the contents of episodic memory over long periods of deliberate practice. The cognitive changes that characterize expertise are held to be consistent across domains. If this is the case, we should expect translation experts to exhibit some of the same cognitive characteristics as experts in other fields. We should be able to both identify and quantify cases of deliberate translation practice and record their effects. Research methods used in expertise studies to verify claims of cognitive changes during novice to expert development should be replicable in translation research. Looking at the expertise studies literature and its findings could provide new directions for research for those interested in translation competence and its relationship to the poorly defined notion of translation expertise. Thus, this paper proposes a theoretical framework for situating translation expertise within empirical translation studies.

During the brief period of “Adjustment” in the first half of the 1960s, China undertook the project of translating and compiling a series of liberal arts textbooks and reference books for higher education, achieving great success in this respect. In terms of general planning and book selection, the project followed the ideas of educational specialization, independent thinking, and ideological engagement. In the process of compiling and translating, the project took advantage of concerted efforts nationwide, enabled an interaction between translation and original research, helped create an atmosphere of scholarship, fostered young talents with international vision, and temporarily spared senior scholars from radical educational reform. However, due to the limitations of the “Adjustment” policy, it was still hampered by the “Great Leap Forward” mentality and politicized research method. Toward the end of this period, the compilation and translation work gradually declined, only to be restarted after 1978.

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.

Examining late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English translation anthologies of classical Chinese poetry by two British sinologists, Herbert Allen Giles and W. J. B. Fletcher, this article explores the translation anthology as a crucial medium for the translator to theorize through practice and a cultural form that enables the translation scholar to anchor theorization in historically constituted practices. The anthologies selected for discussion are single-translator anthologies made by sinologists, where the translator of the poems doubles as the editor of the anthology. Special attention is paid to how the translator-anthologist creates various features within the anthology space through a range of techniques: the use of figurative language that presents the Chinese poems as “gems,” the selection and arrangement of anthology pieces, page layout, retitling, versification, and the interplay between translation and paratextual materials like annotations. This article aims to unpack the making of translation anthologies as complex microcosms of the translation field by reading these features and techniques as acts of discursive engagement, whereby the translator-anthologist mediates multiple forms of knowledge and value, formulates new methods and poetics of translation, and enters into intertextual dialogues with other approaches.

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.

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 theory of Eco-translatology (shengtai fanyixue 生態翻譯學) sees translation processes as part of a system of interdependencies that can be investigated in ecological and biological terms. While explicitly appropriating the principles of Darwinian evolutionism and claiming to draw inspiration from both traditional Chinese wisdom and modern ecological thought, Eco-translatology presents itself as an autochthonous theory with a strong international outreach. Through an analysis of the scholarly endeavor of Eco-translatology, this paper seeks to point out that its tenets resonate significantly with the policies of knowledge production of the contemporary People’s Republic of China and, more generally, with its national ideological agenda. It also intends to show how this self-proclaimed discipline endorses the promotion of a “Chinese discourse” in the field of translation studies, one that would reposition Chinese scholars and theories within the international scientific community, ultimately contributing to the construction and consolidation of its national academic soft power.

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.

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.

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.

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.