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.

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.

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

No 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 focuses on the salient place given to staging both the modern regime of translation and the institution of literature alongside a dramatization of anthropological difference in Liu Cixin’s acclaimed science fiction trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past (also known as The Three Body Problem). These are concerns that are, I would argue, not only historically central to twentieth-century Chinese literature, but also place twentieth-century Chinese literature squarely at the crux of some of the most fundamental questions about aesthetic modernity. These questions revolve around the way in which the type or the figure plays a crucial role in the construction of the nation-state.
As quintessentially modern social institutions, both the regime of translation and the institution of literature converge around aesthetic ideology, in which the figure and the type play a paramount role. This is not just any figure, but rather the figure of the human, configured through the logical economy of genus, species, and individual. As a kind of abstraction that is intimately woven into the fabric of everyday life (or what Marx calls a “real abstraction”), this “logical economy” is most evident in that experience of identity peculiar to modernity: being an individual who belongs to a national community within that community’s membership in a larger, single species among other species. Together, these two institutions form an inherently comparative biopolitical infrastructure that I call the apparatus of area and anthropological difference.
A brief comparison with Wuhe’s Remains of Life helpfully illustrates the extent to which Liu Cixin’s Trilogy is invested in the apparatus of area and anthropological difference that arises through the operation of translation, while a comparison with Mao Dun’s focus on subjective formation helps to highlight the implications of Liu Cixin’s attack on Chinese socialist realism. Liu’s fiction should not be seen as what happens when a large developing nation with a tradition of literary talent achieves the concentration of capital and technology that might permit an ambitious space program, but as what happens when the international institution of literature develops on the basis of an historical repression of its own aesthetic ideology.

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.

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.

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.

Lih Pao was published in Hong Kong in 1938 and ceased publication in 1941. Ye Lingfeng was the editor of Yan Lin, a supplement of Hong Kong’s Lih Pao. With his efforts, Yan Lin showed the characteristics of “cosmopolitan.” Ye Lingfeng supported the layout of Yan Lin through serial translation works. From Red Wings Fly East to The Fox, Ye Lingfeng contributed a series of translations to Yan Lin, which not only had practical significance, but also reflected the obvious literary orientation. As a New Literature writer, Ye Lingfeng’s translation value goes beyond the translation itself. With mainland writers coming south, Hong Kong became a center of New Culture and New Literature during the war. Yan Lin has played an important role in the development of New Literature in Hong Kong. If we consider the three types of subject matter of the articles published in Yan Lin, the reporting of domestic literature and the introduction of foreign works are connected with the construction of local literature in Hong Kong. Ye Lingfeng’s translation reflects the reliance on Western writers and literary translation in the period of New Literature construction. The excellent translations of Yan Lin such as Early Love have become a model of New Literary creation and integrate into the literary history of Hong Kong.