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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

Joseph de Prémare was a French Jesuit who went to China in the reign of Emperor Kangxi. He was banished to Guangzhou by Emperor Yongzheng, who had been hostile to Catholicism ever since he was enthroned. In Guangzhou, Prémare translated eight poems from the Shijing into French, all being taken from the sections “Ya” and “Song”. He showed almost no interest in the poems from the more lyrical “Guofeng”. The poems he translated addressed his love of Chinese sage kings and their benevolent rule. His interpretations, typical of Jesuit figurism, were replete with intriguing intimations of Christian doctrine. Prémare employed poetic figurism to connect the Shijing to the Shenjing, or the Bible, in the eighteenth century.

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.

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.

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.