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.

The arrival of educated Protestant diplomats and missionaries in China in the early nineteenth century did not only bring new modern languages into contact with Chinese. The mistranslation “Barbarian Eye” may reflect a knowledge of a similar term in the Ancient Greek of Aristophanes, while the Bible was translated not from Latin or English but from the original languages, including New Testament Greek. The English word “religion” in the Authorized Version New Testament was therefore translated variously into Chinese by successive English speakers from Robert Morrison onward not in its modern English meaning, but in the meaning of the underlying Greek. But such difficult choices concerning key words in religious discourse were not being made for the first time: translators from Prakrit to Greek and from Prakrit to Chinese had long before confronted similar issues. Nor were they made in isolation from other translation challenges, such as deciding on the rendering of the word “superstition.”

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.

On 18 May 1929, Xinyou Drama Society staged Leonid Andreev’s The Waltz of the Dogs, which was translated and directed by Zhu Rangcheng. The choice of the playtext was different from those staged by Shanghai amateur drama groups, so were the translation methods adopted. Zhu Rangcheng expected to educate the audience by showing them real art, so he chose what he thought to be of high artistic value and tried to represent the original in his translation. Referring to several less-used or unknown sources, this article first analyzes the features presented in the production of the play, and then explores the reasons behind and the impact it had on both Xinyou and other amateur drama groups in Shanghai. The production of The Waltz of the Dogs reveals the dynamic and interactive nature of the translation activities on Shanghai stage.

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

This review provides a critical review of Chunshen Zhu’s monograph, Fathoming Translation as Discursive Experience: Theorization and Application (2021). Zhu aims to develop a “positive mode of translation studies” through his Structure of Meaning (SOM) model, which conceptualizes the making of meaning across three dimensions— compositional, interactional, and experiential. However, this review argues that SOM presents an overly static and idealized view of the translation process that neglects the potential for communicative failure and experimental translation practices.
Drawing on theories from Derrida, Bakhtin, Kristeva, Barthes, Massumi and Robinson, the review identifies several limitations in Zhu’s approach. It argues SOM assumes a metaphysical ontology of fixed authorial intentions that fails to account for the iterable and disseminated nature of textual meaning. Communication is presented as certain rather than acknowledging factors like double reading and the uncontrollability of effects. The model also imposes artificial separations between translation dimensions that obscure their interdependent, performative nature.
The review then considers alternative perspectives that could address these issues, such as conceptualizing translation as iterated meaning-making through the relay of texts’ trace elements. I also examine how recognizing the “death of the author” and the intertextual constitution of texts undermines claims to intrinsic intentions. The importance of embracing communicative instability and experimental practices is highlighted.
While acknowledging that SOM provides a model of normative translation, I argue that Zhu’s static structuralism neglects the productive dynamism of dialogical, performative, and experimental approaches. I aim to prompt revision of rigid ontological assumptions and consideration of translation’s social enactment through heteronymous narrativity. The increasingly narrow specialization of translation studies has recently been recognized as a serious problem. How can anyone possibly understand the field as a whole, when so many scholars are deploying research methodologies that baffle almost everyone else?
While this reviewer does not have a solution to those problems, Chunshen Zhu, in his Fathoming Translation as Discursive Experience: Theorization and Application (hereinafter referred to as Fathoming Translation), claims to. Zhu’s solution is to delineate “a positive mode of translation studies” (15), or positive translation studies for short, which according to him is “explorative, descriptive, analytical, explanatory, and predicative rather than prescriptive” (16), with the wish to build an interdisciplinary network among linguistics, literature, culture, sociology, etc. so as to provide a coherent theoretical model for translation studies. By framing the making of meaning into a three-dimensional structure (SOM, or structure of meaning) before applying it to discursive experience, exploring the concept of Unit of Translation (UT), and ultimately fathoming translation “as cross-cultural text-sign production” (23), Zhu describes his positive translation studies thus: It describes and analyzes translation as a phenomenon of cross-lingual and cross-cultural meaning making, putting forward hypotheses about it in terms of norms (i.e., “normal” rather than “normative” practices) and explaining their workings in the production, operation, and reception of a translation, during which meaning is realized as discursive experience triggered by the text and undergone by the reader in a particular social situation. (15)

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.

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.

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

This article examines how Christopher Markert’s staged translation of the Book of Changes (1986) uses visual and verbal peritexts to construct a façade of cultural legitimacy. While Markert’s version presents ideological arguments against Western culture absent from established sinological scholarship, it makes several statements which suggest engagement with Chinese sources and incorporates an extensive array of Chinese visual features such as decontextualized Chinese characters and copies of traditional Chinese paintings on nearly every double-page spread. By drawing on Genette’s paratext theory, Peircean semiotics, and MacCannell’s staged authenticity, this study argues that these peritextual strategies do not function as meaningful textual references but as signifiers of “Chineseness” that simulate indexical connection to Chinese sources. Particularly, the article demonstrates how Markert’s systematic visual saturation creates a persuasive veneer of cultural legitimacy that enables what is effectively a staged translation to circulate internationally as a genuine representation of the Chinese classic. The findings reveal a paratextual strategy wherein cultural signifiers are deployed to authenticate a text, bypassing the sort of genuine indexical relationship to source materials that traditionally grounds translation as a practice. This case study contributes to translation studies by extending paratextual analysis beyond literary framing and introducing the concept of staged translation, demonstrating how visual elements especially can function as mechanisms of legitimation that perform the authority a text otherwise lacks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Substantial research has been done on the translations in literary periodicals in Shanghai at the turn of the twentieth century, while the literary periodicals in Hong Kong remain largely unattended. This paper will offer a panoramic view of the serialized literary translation in Xinxiaoshuo cong 新小說叢 (Collection of new fiction) (1907-1908) in Hong Kong from “internal dialogics” and “external dialogics.” The case study will focus on the Chinese translation of The File No. 113 by early French detective writer, Emile Gaboriau, in the periodical. Comparison will be made with another Chinese rendition in Xiaoshuo lin 小說林 (Fiction forest). This paper aims to investigate the serialized literary translation in Hong Kong periodicals and make a comparison between the two Chinese versions of the abovementioned case from three aspects, namely the women image, the legal system and jurisdiction, and religion. The study aims to reveal the interaction between translation and society in the two cities.

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.

This paper looks at the relationship between cognitive effort and contextual effect with respect to the interface between inferential processing, problem-solving and decision-making in translation, within a comprehensive framework of Relevance Theory, connectionist principles and competence-oriented researches of translation (CORT). It draws on the methodological notion of triangulation of previous researches to locate cognitive patterns related to the inferential behaviour of translators. Sample data from Spanish and Brazilian translators working from English into Spanish and Portuguese are examined, with concurrent use of different data elicitation procedures via Translog and retrospective protocols. The performance of novice and expert translators is assessed on the basis of cognitive rhythm, deliberate practice and the relationship between cognitive effort and contextual effect. The tentative outcome of the data analysis appears to support the amalgamation of procedural and conceptual encodings as constitutive instances of inferential processing. It also reveals aspects of a multi-level process mediated by the meta- representation that the translator has of both source and target texts. As a result, the relevance-theoretic approach to translation process seems able to account for how effort and effect may combine in a dynamic synergy to deal with the implicatures and explicatures of source texts and how this combination allows cognitive processing and textual rendering to take shape in different cognitive environments and ultimately in different target texts.

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.

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.

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.

While in-between knowledge has proved to be vital for the growth of translation studies, the actual and potential influence of translation theory on other disciplines has received little attention. Its contribution to digital humanities, for example, has been considered mostly in relation to the use of translation as a tool to disseminate knowledge at research events. Although in recent years digital humanities has shown increased interest in languages and linguistic diversity, its techno- linguistic foundations remain limited to English.
Translation supplies digital humanities with an interesting epistemo-methodological problem that challenges monocultural epistemologies in text computing. While distant reading in one language is relatively straightforward, computation across languages faces many challenges, including Anglophone bias, economies of scale, blackboxes, and lack of phenomenological depth. If we can solve these problems, disrupting monolingual practices in knowledge production would be one of many benefits of cross-linguistic computation.
In this paper, I will discuss the affordances of translation by drawing on my ongoing research, including the DRaL (Distant Reading across Languages) project which began with the concerns of how to make digital research epistemologies more inclusive of and more open to languages other than English.

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.

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 Taiwanese government has formulated a policy to develop the society to be bilingual (Chinese and English), and all information relevant to foreigners’ lives should be available in English. This descriptive study aims to discuss the feasibility of the policy and make recommendations from the perspectives of institutional translation and translation policy, with special reference to translation quality control. The European Commission is taken as a reference case. In the first part, the documentation method is employed. In the second, the article samples eighteen websites of the central government of Taiwan for bilingualization in checking with the performance indicator set in the Blueprint of the policy as a comparative content analysis. Two bilingual texts from two websites are selected to evaluate the translation quality using genre analysis and the functionalist approach. Given the future volume and scale of government translation, more resources are called for, while the professionalization of the industry and a quality assurance (QA) system are recommended.

This paper deals with the rise of a new wave of Chinese science fiction over the last decades, attempting to draw a parallel to twentieth-century American science fiction. The paper explores the many similarities (as well as some differences) between these two phenomena, relying on both translation studies and genre studies. Drawing on a definition of genre as a “recurring response to recurring situations” (Miller 1984), the paper briefly examines historical, social, and literary conditions of the two countries, providing examples of the agents, the works, and the reasons that allow us to describe this process as a form of “inter-generic translation.” This study aims at providing an overview of the present discourse on Chinese science fiction in relation to the American experience, highlighting the potential for further and deeper developments of this kind of analysis.

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 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.

Horizontal translation is a cognitive process where the source text is trans- coded into the target text via memory without any conceptual mediation between the two texts. The ability to exploit trans-coding is considered the signature of a skilled interpreter/translator. However, it is unclear when exactly trans-coding may apply and whether it can apply to a whole grammatical construction. In this paper I investigate a situation where trans- coding appears to have applied to a whole grammatical construction when conceptual mediation between the source and the target representation is blocked by non-interpretable alien source concepts. I argue that such trans- coding at complete grammatical constructions is still memory-based, possibly via pattern-associated memory.

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.