Top access

  • Published in last 1 year
  • In last 2 years
  • In last 3 years
  • All

Please wait a minute...
  • Select all
    |
  • Wenjie Hong, Caroline Rossi
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2021, 5(2): 83-115.
    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.
  • Special Issue Articles
    Patrick Chenglong Zhou
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2025, 9(1): 1-12.
  • Special Issue Articles
    Long Li, Sixin Liao
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2025, 9(1): 13-48.
    This study explores the intersection of Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) visual grammar and reader perceptions of the covers of Chinese-translated books, revealing both the complexity of reader perceptions and the explanatory powers of visual grammar in this under-researched context. The research firstly applies visual grammar to semiotically analyze ten covers of Chinese émigré literature translated from English to Chinese and subsequently investigates, via questionnaires, how sixty-five Chinese readers interpret key semiotic elements on the covers. Results from the semiotic analyzes and questionnaires confirm the utility of visual grammar in predicting reader interactions with translation book covers, particularly in terms of the represented dynamism as achieved within the ideational metafunction. However, misalignment between predictions and actual reader perceptions is revealed in terms of the social distance between human figures and viewers by an interpersonal metafunction analysis. Visual grammar proves less efficacious in predicting reader interactions than in determining how readers understand the representations on covers. The study discusses implications of these findings for applying visual grammar to multimodal translation and for designing effective translation book covers, advocating for designs that are both appealing and ethically inclusive of the translator’s name. This research sets the stage for further studies involving controlled semiotic variables and broader engagement with the design and reader communities.
  • Book Reviews
    Zhongli Yu
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2018, 2(2): 129-135.
  • Special Issue Articles
    Minying Ye, Xi Chen
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2025, 9(1): 49-86.
    The English translation of the Chinese classic comic Chan Shuo 禪說 has garnered significant attention as a vital medium for introducing Chinese Chan Buddhism to English readers. This study investigates the representational meaning that emerges through the comic translation of Chan Shuo. In a digital humanities (DH) approach, the study first creates a self-built database of bilingual texts and images of Chan Master and then utilizes two tools developed at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, UAM CorpusTool and ImageTool, to annotate the database systematically, culminating in an analysis of the multimodal representational realizations of Chan Master. Based on the analytical framework combining visual grammar and visual narrative, it scrutinizes the participants, processes, and circumstances through both quantitative and qualitative methods. Moreover, it seeks to explore the multimodal translation methods to adapt Chan story for contemporary readers by examining the representation of Chan Master’s image through the text- image interplay. The findings indicate that such a multimodal translation adeptly conveys the inclusiveness and dynamism of the Chan Master, effectively transmitting core concepts of Chan Buddhism to the English- speaking world.
  • Book Reviews
    Patrick Chenglong Zhou
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2025, 9(1): 189-196.
  • Yunrou Liu
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2024, 8(2): 1-28.
    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.
  • Wai-on Law
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2024, 8(1): 1-38.
    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.
  • Antonio Leggieri
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2024, 8(1): 39-68.
    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.
  • Book Reviews
    Xuemei Chen
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2025, 9(1): 185-188.
  • Lingjie Ji
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2021, 5(2): 23-52.
    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.
  • Rainer Guldin
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2020, 4(1): 5-25.
    This essay focuses on the spatiotemporal notion of liminality and the way it can be mapped onto translation processes and the role of the translator. The concept of liminality can be traced back to Arnold van Gennep’s (1960) rites of passage and their re-elaboration by Victor Turner (1967 and 1974). It has recently been theorized within the social sciences as a central concept that allows a redefinition of the relationship of structure and agency (Thomassen 2014; Szakolczai 2015). In postcolonial studies (Bhabha 2006) and translation studies, it has been frequently used as a synonym of the notions of in-betweenness and third space (Aammari 2017; Bery 2007; Inghilleri 2017; Johnston 2007). However, despite some common traits, liminality offers a more comprehensive and dynamic approach. The notion of liminality is, furthermore, connected to the spatial metaphors of the door (Simmel 1957), the threshold, the arcade (Benjamin 2002 and 2004) and the gate (Tawada 2003; Sakai 2011), which do not conceive of languages as isolated self-contained units but focus on a possible opening between systems whose character is otherwise left unspecified.
  • Book Reviews
    Reviewed by Barbara Jiawei Li
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2025, 9(2): 127-133.
  • David D. Kim
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2018, 2(1): 5-34.
    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.
  • Special Issue: Hong Kong Translation History
    Tengfei Ma
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2022, 6(1): 1-51.
    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.
  • Regular Contributions
    Andrea Musumeci, Dominic Glynn
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2025, 9(1): 87-130.
    This article provides a thorough review of constraints in translation studies. It analyzes existing literature to assess whether constraints positively or negatively impact translators. Drawing on studies of translation constraints, it proposes an ecosystemic perspective, viewing constraints as transversal elements within translation ecosystems that manifest differently according to given environments and organisms. We propose an abstracted constraint prioritization procedure aimed at harnessing affordance perception, a skill that learners, scholars, and practitioners might find beneficial. The article concludes by providing an ecosystemic map of these forces, and it brings to the surface the importance of establishing clear vantage points to create ecologically valid abstractions, underscoring that constraints lead translators to perceive affordances. This ecological and affordance-based perspective aims to enable learners and practitioners to better incorporate the “constraint concept” in their work and connect the scholarly and professional communities. One such area of connection is translator’s posture, centered on how translators occupy a position in the environments forming their domains of practice, be they textual, professional, or social.
  • Jinxin Qi, Dechao Li
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2023, 7(1): 23-44.
    As a political novel that advocates violence against the Qing government by then revolutionists, Free Marriage brings severe criticism of the society to the fore. The novel, replete with strong political motivations, is under the guise of translation for two reasons: first, it can attract target readers due to the popularity of the translated works at that time; second, it can evade censorship from the authority. Translation is not an end but a means of “resistance” and even “engagement” for the pseudotranslators. Pseudotranslation is the quintessence and the most radical form of activism translation. By catering to the dominant ideology in society, the pseudotranslator brings the revolutionary or even subversive role of translation during transitional periods into full play.
  • Raluca Tanasescu
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2021, 5(1): 1-29.
    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.
  • Jie Liu
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2023, 7(2): 97-130.
    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.
  • Yuanyuan Chen
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2022, 6(2): 1-33.
    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.
  • Jie Hu
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2024, 8(1): 69-90.
    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.
  • Mattias Daly
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2024, 8(2): 51-90.
    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.
  • Regular Contributions
    Bo Li, Dominic Glynn
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2025, 9(1): 159-184.
    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.
  • Articles
    Yu-kit CHEUNG
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2011, 14(1-2): 97-116.
    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.
  • Chengcheng You
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2025, 9(2): 1-36.
    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.
  • Weiheng Kong
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2025, 9(2): 37-58.
    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.
  • Qilin Cao
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2021, 5(2): 53-82.
    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.
  • Special Issue: Hong Kong Translation History
    Yunrou Liu
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2022, 6(1): 115-145.
    In 1952, Everyman’s Literature, a literary periodical, was established in Hong Kong. The present scholarship contends that the periodical was financially supported by the US, and the literary translations in the periodical were an inseparable part of the American translation scheme in the 1950s Hong Kong. In fact, Everyman’s Literature did not directly receive the financial support, therefore its translations were not political tools. Instead, the editor Huang Sicheng brilliantly orchestrated the translations to show and promote his literary ideas. Referring to the sources that have been barely broached, this article scrutinizes Huang’s reading history, explores his acquisition of the knowledge of literature, and further discusses the impact of his knowledge system on the choice of the translated texts in Everyman’s Literature. With the perspective of reading history, the paper hopes to open up a new analytical path for the study on the mainland literati in Hong Kong.
  • Genzhong He
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2023, 7(2): 1-35.
    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.
  • Haoyu Wang
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2020, 4(2): 1-1.
    This paper argues that handy translation strategies and a proper view of the original text, instead of talent and educational background, are the major reasons for good translations, by using the example of Y. R. Chao’s translations of the Alice duology. By reviewing and comparing existing research papers, this paper tries to identify current misunderstandings of the duology as well as of their translations. Then by applying Chao’s translation philosophy (represented by the dimensions of fidelity) to the analysis of the translated poem “Jabberwocky,” tentative answers to existing confusions are provided. Then problems of Chao’s dimensions of fidelity are discussed. In the end, an example is presented to show how translation strategies like those of Chao’s can practically lead to better translations.
  • Duncan Poupard
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2020, 4(1): 51-74.
    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.
  • Rui Liu
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2020, 4(2): 63-155.
    In the translation history of the Qing Code, George Jamieson used his translation to map a reform route that was neglected in Chinese legal history. Based on first-hand archival material, this article reconstructs the untrodden route by recovering Jamieson’s vision on the value of Qing family law in the new era. Having outlined the legal and social conditions that boosted his assurance, it proceeds to analyze the message he hoped to convey to Chinese lawmakers by probing his opposition to drastic changes and advocacy for gradual reform. In the face of an imminent legal reform, Jamieson attached importance to “selecting” and “adapting” those parts of foreign law that could accommodate native institutions. His dialogue with modern English law in translating Qing marriage law set a model in this regard.
  • Hisham M. Ali
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2019, 3(2): 93-113.
    Part of a larger study on the viability and relevance of symptomatic reading practice to the much broader scope of reception theory and translation criticism, this article investigates a range of discontinuities in two Arabic translations of Gibran’s The Earth Gods, one by the Archimandrite Anthony Bashir and the other by Egypt’s Minister of Culture Tharwat Okasha. Putting to work the methodological assumptions of Venuti’s symptomatic reading, instances of religious correctness and (in)determinacy are examined within the framework of reception theory, specifically Fish’s theory of interpretive communities, to explore how texts work upon individuals to create a community and how a community works upon a text to generate meaning. The analysis ends with a discussion of the temporality of the translators’ interventions and the historicity of reception, with a particular focus on the paratextual reviews of the critical establishment as a situational interpretive community. The symptomatic reading offers pointers as to how the translators experimented with the metaphysical system of Gibran.
  • Yan Wu
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2019, 3(2): 1-32.
    Wu Tao was an important and mysterious translator in the translation field during the period of the late Qing Dynasty. He only has a few works published, but his translation style is too unique to be neglected. Through chronologically arranging all his existing works, and closely comparing and analyzing them with their Japanese originals, this paper summarizes three important factors that constitute the unique style of Wu Tao’s translation: the incorporation of various elements such as Japanese original typesetting and even punctuation into the translated texts; simulating and recreating the “breathing of the text,” i.e., to imitate the breaking up of the original Japanese sentences as much as possible; maintaining the exact order of the Chinese words. This paper holds that Wu Tao’s translation strategy can be regarded as a practical form of the “translation” method of word-translating, but it does not stop there. This kind of translation method is a product stem from the unique historical situation when the literati in the late Qing Dynasty encountered the Meiji Japanese writing style. It also opens a new possibility for the modern transformation of the vernacular style.
  • James St. André
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2020, 4(1): 1-4.
  • Stacey Triplette, Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Helena Bermúdez Sabel
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2018, 2(1): 35-58.
    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.
  • Lorenzo Andolfatto
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2019, 3(1): 45-67.
  • Book Reviews
    Yuxia Gao, Riccardo Moratto
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2021, 5(2): 128-132.
  • Journal of Translation Studies. 2025, 9(1): 197-199.
  • Yvonne Tsai
    Journal of Translation Studies. 2024, 8(2): 91-116.
    With artificial intelligence (AI) reshaping and restructuring the translation industry in 2024, the need for deliberate translation technology design is more crucial than ever. This paper examines the effects of online collaboration using computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools and digital platforms for drama scripts and evaluates translator- computer interactions using four challenges identified by O’Brien (2012): dehumanization and devaluation; creativity and quality; complexity and text; and interaction and design (108). A translation technology cognition questionnaire and CAT technology application experience questionnaire were used in this research to explore the effectiveness and limitations of CAT platforms for literary translation in order to enhance students’ future adaptability in the face of changes in the world. The overall response to the use of CAT tools in script translation was positive. Over half the respondents agreed that CAT tools facilitated collaborative translation and encouraged members to participate. The participants also found that collaborating with team members through the platform was easy.