1st Edition
Translation Studies and China Literature, Cinema, and Visual Arts
Focusing on transculturality, this edited volume explores how the role of translation and the idea of (un)translatability in the transformative complementation of different civilizations facilitates the transcultural connection between Chinese and other cultures in the modern era.
Bringing together established international scholars and emerging new voices, this collection explores the linguistic, social, and cultural implications of translation and transculturality. The 13 chapters not only discuss the translation of literature, but also break new ground by addressing the translation of cinema, performance, and the visual arts, which are active bearer of modern and contemporary culture that are often neglected by academics. Our volume is ground-breaking in its trans-disciplinary attention to the study of translation related to China and such a trans-disciplinality should serve as a ground-breaking leverage for other areas of humanities as well. Through an engagement with these diverse fields, the title aims not only to reflect on how translation has reproduced values, concepts, and cultural forms, but also to stimulate the emergence of new possibilities in the dynamic transcultural interplay between China and the diverse national, cultural-linguistic, and contexts of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. It shows how cultures have been appropriated, misunderstood, transformed, and reconstructed through processes of linguistic mediation, as well as how knowledge, understanding, and connections have been generated through transculturality.
The book will be a must read for scholars and students of translation studies, transcultural studies, and Chinese studies.
1. Introduction
Haiping Yan, Haina Jin, Paul Gladston
2. Mutual Transwritings: China in the World
Haiping Yan
3. Changes in the Contemporary Translation of Irish literature: A Case study of the Translation of James Joyce
Congrong Dai
4. Chinese Children’s Literature in Translation: A case study of reader responses in the UK
Frances Weightman
5. The Politics of Translation: the Rockefeller Foundation and the China Translation Project in the Early Cold War (1947-1952)
Ruoze Huang
6. Comparable Diversities: Translating Modern Chinese Literature with a Transcultural Approach
Nicoletta Pesaro
7. The Beginning of the Importation of New Literature from Exotic Countries Into China: Zhou Zuoren and Yuwai xiaoshuoji
Lawrence Wang Chi Wong
8. Back Translation in Film Restoration A Case Study of The Romance of the Western Chamber (1927)
Haina Jin and Hao Li
9. The visualized translation of classical Chinese poetry: A case study of the BBC documentary Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet
Youlan Tao and Haochuan Xie
10. An Exploration of Cdrama Distribution Networks in Spanish-Speaking Countries from the Viewpoint of a Chinese-Spanish Fansub
Luis Damián Moreno García
11. Paradigm Shift of Cinematic Translations in China in the Digital Age
Xiqing Zheng
12. Translating Chinese Culture and History in Museum Exhibitions: Translation as Cultural Interpretation
Meifang Xia
13. Translating Theatre. Lin Zhaohua’s “Foreign Classics” Productions with a Special Focus on Dürrenmatt’s Romulus the Great
Anna Stecher
14. Dis-/Continuing Traditions: Polylogic Translation, Chinese Contemporary Art and the Traces of Confucian-literati Culture
Paul Gladston
Biography
Haiping Yan is the Tsinghua Academy Professor of the Class of World Literatures and Cultures and the Founding Dean of the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures, Tsinghua University, China, as well as the Director of the Executive Council and Secretary General of the China-UK Alliance for the Humanities in Higher Education (UKCHA). Her research focuses on comparative studies of modern literatures, intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries, and transcultural theories with numerous publications in transnational feminism, transcultural modernism, and critical cosmopolitanism.
Haina Jin is a professor of translation, cinematic, and transcultural studies at the Communication University of China. She is an invited member of UKCHA, and the series editor of Routledge Series in Chinese Cinema. Her research interests include film translation, translation history, and film history.
Paul Gladston is the inaugural Judith Neilson Chair Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and a distinguished affiliate member of the UKCHA. He has written extensively on contemporary art and culture with respect to the concerns of critical/cultural theory.
"The essays comprising Translation Studies and China are path-breaking in their scope—from film dubbing and back translation, to theatre, exhibition, visual art and children's books, then to poetry and fiction. And for their dialectical subtlety, which simultaneously focuses on translation as repetition of values, to translation as the domination of one set of values over others, and finally to the free possibilities symmetrical between languages that translation can prompt. The book is exemplary in its focus on the uniqueness of individual translation instances rather than on the application of theory, while in some cases generating theory. In the book's emphasis on the global situatedness of China within the forest of languages, it is nothing if not cosmopolitan."
Daniel Herwitz, Fredric Huetwell Professor, Philosophy, Comparative Literature and History of Art, University of Michigan, USA
"Translation studies is the new (inter-)cultural studies, linking texts with contexts, language with linguistics, and intercultural communication with reception. The term translation embraces the whole circuit of meaning making and meaning decoding in relation to transculturality, the recontextualization of diverse cultures across different interpretive communities across the world. In China, like everywhere, the achievement of modernity requires transculturalism. This discursive matrix relies on cultural intermediaries, in this volume described as translators, who negotiate the sense-making process. That Chinese scholars are at the forefront of this discipline is unsurprising as they take on the task of internationalizing China in a global world that is grappling with different and often contesting ontologies, cultures and ideologies. This volume is a leader in that task."
Keyan G Tomaselli, Distinguished Professor, University of Johannesburg and member, Academy of Science for South Africa
