Intercultural Mediation in the Translation of the Self in Travel Writing: A Case Study of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper

Abstract

ABSTRACT Travel writing narrates travellers’ psychological development through mediation in the complex interplay between otherness and identity. Based on the notion that translation embraces personal experience and active transformation of the self through text, this paper manifests travel writing as a translation of the self of the traveller/writer. It aims to investigate intercultural mediation in the traveller’s translation of the self via a case study, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, a travel writing classic by Fuchsia Dunlop. We first explore Dunlop’s intercultural mediation by drawing on the concept of acculturation, focusing on her stresses and strategy in acculturation and intercultural adaptation throughout her translation of the self. We then review her ethic of difference in intercultural mediation. Dunlop adopts the integration strategy through intercultural contact. Her attitude towards Chinese culinary culture changes from an unconscious core belief in ethnocentrism to an acknowledgement of ethnorelativity, finally achieving an intercultural adaptation. Dunlop’s memoir provides an opportunity to look at a broadening concept of translation, which is to examine the translation of the self in an intercultural context, particularly changes in translators’ attitudes towards cultural difference: ignore it or open up to it.