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.

This chapter traces the history of machine translation (MT) from the pioneers to the latest research on corpus-based systems. In the early systems of the 1950s and 1960s, rule-based approaches dominated in MT projects, particularly in the United States and the Soviet Union. Early enthusiasm was followed by disillusionment when expected results failed to materialize, giving rise to the ALPAC report in the mid-1960s, which effectively ended most research funding for the next decade. However, in the 1980s MT research was revived with new approaches (mainly so-called “transfer” systems, but also knowledge- based and interlingual systems) and the first operational systems in large corporations and in institutions such as the European Communities. During the 1990s, however, researchers turned to statistical methods, using the increasingly available large bilingual corpora (original texts and their human translations). In the past decade, corpus-based approaches (example-based methods and particularly statistical machine translation) have dominated MT research. Since 1990, there has also been an ever-greater adoption of systems and translation tools by large corporations and institutions and an increasing use of online MT systems by the general public.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The literary idea of “Shangri-la” has today been realized as a geographic space in the Tibetan borderlands of southwest China. The minority peoples who live within this zone that has seen a massive tourism boom are, in effect, now linguistic “prisoners of Shangri-la”: despite possessing their own minority languages, sociopolitical factors dictate that ethnic minority writers often have little choice but to write in Chinese. Nevertheless, there is a way for them to negotiate a way out of the prison-house of language: foreignizing “inner translations” that rewrite, and destabilize, the landscape itself.
This paper asserts that translation is a defining characteristic of the re-negotiation of peripheral spaces within Chinese minority literature. This study focuses on the construction of minority hometown spaces, such as Shangri-la in Yunnan and the Baima areas of northern Sichuan: both these areas are technically Tibetan according to Chinese state classification, yet they possess unique ethnic identities that are constructed in Chinese literature via phonetic translations (often re-translations or re-transcriptions) from the minority language into Chinese. The literary re-translation of local toponyms serves to contest official, Sinicized naming practices, producing nativized place names that act as markers, signposts from which we can see how meanings and mappings of ethnicity, nature, and culture can be shaped and reshaped in translation.

This paper examines the translation activities of the People’s Dramatic Society (Minzhong Xijushe 民眾戲劇社) established in May 1921 by literary writers and drama professionals who aimed at producing dramatic texts that could be performed on stage after successive failures in staging translated Western dramas since the literary revolution in late Qing China. Through translation, members of the Society made comprehensive investigations of Western theaters and introduced a wide range of theatrical knowledge into China, which in reverse broadened the translators’ vision to encompass different dimensions of theater as a form of integrated arts. As a result, a new way of translation called trans-adaptation (gai yi 改譯 ) that catered for stage performances became popular among drama translators, marking a great step forward in the making of modern Chinese drama.

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.

Frederick Tsai (1918-2004) was a famous essayist and translator in Hong Kong. He was one of the few local translators who were also translation teachers, literary translation scholars, and literary translation critics. In a translation career spanning over forty years, he translated over twenty books and around sixty poems and short stories published in literary journals. His translations are widely acknowledged as both idiomatically accurate and faithful. In addition to performing translations, Tsai published four books on translation studies, in which he strongly advocated a sense of Chineseness in Chinese translation— to employ the existing Chinese structures, phrases, and so on as far as possible to avoid translationese. His books have been well received and are deemed essential introductory reading in practical translation. As much as Tsai is a luminary in the field of translation, not much academic attention, if any at all, has been paid to him as a person, to his Chinese translations, and to his achievements as a translator. This essay unearths Tsai’s life as a translator, serving as a preliminary step in investigating his translation career and achievements.

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.

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.

In this article, the author examines the prefacing of the translation of Wu Zhuoliu’s Orphan of Asia in relation to the notion of Orientalism, first exploring the rewriting of prefaces as a type of Orientalism, by studying the differences between the Chinese and English introductory paratexts. The author questions whether scholars can move away from this prefacing system that produces uneven knowledge. Orientalism, as defined by Edward Said (1978a, 3), is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Said’s argument extends beyond his original focus of the Middle East as Oriental. For scholars of East Asian studies, Orientalism is also a familiar term. In Dru C. Gladney’s (1994, 94) discussion of national representation in China, the term “oriental Orientalism” is coined to address internal Orientalism. This examination of Orphan of Asia demonstrates how preface writing is a powerful producer of knowledge, and the author argues that Orientalist notions are intermingled within the practice of preface writing. Because Orphan of Asia has multiple translations, it has multiple introductions as well. Hence, it is meaningful to examine these texts and the treatment of the original introductions. It is especially noteworthy that the two former Chinese editions of the classic include a translation of the original Japanese preface and a rewritten Chinese preface, while the English edition presents a new foreword. These trilingual paratexts serve as primary texts, which are taken from the Chinese (1977)1 and the English (2006) renditions.

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.

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 research on the English translation of The Journey to the West has received growing attention from the academia over the past ten years or so, with new research results emerging constantly. However, scholars have focused solely on the study of individual translations or comparative analyses of various translations of the novel, and seldom examined the English translation history of The Journey to the West from a diachronic perspective; nor have they compared it to the history of studies on the fiction itself, exploring the interaction between translation and research. This paper will use first-hand archival sources, combine textual analysis with historical contextualization, and integrate the research approaches of different disciplines such as translation studies, literature, history and religion, in order to reveal how the English translation history of The Journey to the West is related to and interacts with its academic history.

The aim of this essay is to examine how the study of world literature has decisively moved into a new postcolonial direction with the latest investigation of the unnamed Chinese novel on which Goethe formulates his much-quoted world literary imagination. He conceptualizes world literature as a subversive and aspirational imaginary in opposition to the increasingly dominant Hegelian world vision, on the one hand posing itself as an aesthetic cosmopolitanism opposed to French national politics, on the other hand destabilizing the calcifying Eurocentric hierarchy of cultures, languages, literatures, nations, and religions in the 1820s. This world literary imagination is inseparable from the long history of Orientalism, but its newness comes with a pioneering philological representation of China by French Orientalist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. I illustrate how a hybrid digital methodology in the intersection of German, translation, and postcolonial studies reveals the missing link between Orientalism, Goethe’s notion of world literature, and the Chinese novel.

Recent scholarship on canonical late Qing and early Republican science fiction has accentuated the role of translation as a channel of import that contributed to the birth of the genre in China. The paper proceeds from this view of translation, but contends that the current historiography does not confront the complexity of the emergence of the genre, which took place in the vast textual landscape of the periodical press through the appropriation of foreign verbal and visual sources. This mode of emergence is described in the paper with a case study of the transmission of the images of the German science fiction film Frau Im Mond in Chinese periodicals during the period 1929-1933.
The case study, inspired by keyword searches in the National Periodical Index and Shenbao databases, explores how the film was reported, synopsized and advertised in the film magazine Silverland and the newspaper Shenbao in the years preceding its first screening in Shanghai in 1933. In the next decade, the media coverage was followed by a surge of interest in space missions to the Moon in a wide range of periodicals. Tracking the transmission of the cinematic images and examining later periodical publications about lunar exploration, the paper observes that the borderline between scientific writing and science fiction in this period was not only indistinct, but that indistinctiveness was also self-strengthening, as it became a source of wonder in the Chinese periodical press that motivated the continuous inflow of visual and verbal sources of science and science fiction from abroad. With its method and observations, the paper hopes to open up new materials and analytical paths for the study of the role of translation in the emergence of science fiction in China.

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 article introduces Foucault’s power/discourse theory and discusses its application to feminism and translation studies. This article also argues that the female power that is embodied in the feminist source text can be strengthened or weakened by the work undertaken by translators in the translation process.

With technologies becoming more widely and firmly established in the language industries, translator education programs must produce graduates who are knowledgeable about and comfortable with today’s translation tools. How then can translator education programs meet future translators’ and employers’ needs with limited time and resources? One strategy is to adopt a more holistic approach, which seeks to integrate tool use across different elements of the program, including within “core” technology courses, in practical translation and other courses, and as part of independent study activities. Achieving this goal, however, is not without challenges, and it requires an investment of time and effort on the part of both educators and students. In 2007, a new translation technology education initiative was launched at the University of Ottawa’s School of Translation and Interpretation (UO-STI). This initiative is centered around the Collection of Electronic Resources in Translation Technologies (CERTT) project. Motivated by a desire to improve the way in which technology- related knowledge and skills are taught to translators, the CERTT team has developed a framework to assist educators and students in exploring and using a range of over thirty computer tools and resources for translators. This centralized collection of tutorials, exercises, corpora, sample files for use with tools, and other related resources is currently being integrated into LinguisTech, which is an online portal and translator’s toolbox intended to supply information and access to a range of language technologies to translation students across Canada, as well as to certain other users. This article describes some key challenges associated with teaching translation technologies and presents the underlying philosophy and framework of the CERTT project, explaining how CERTT seeks to address them. It also briefly reports on the experience of the first four years of teaching with CERTT at UO-STI.