Mapping Salience and Trajectory: On How to Situate Literary Translators in Publishing Legends of the Condor Heroes With Visualization

Abstract

As a publishing success, Legends of the Condor Heroes ( Legends) dispelled the belief that Jin Yong’s works are untranslatable, necessitating fresh scholarly attention. With a mixed-methods approach, this article investigates literary translators’ positioning in publishing network based on empirical data from paratexts, online sources and existing research of Legends through Actor-Network Theory (ANT)-inspired ethnography. It represents these data with visualized networks using Gephi, and conducts social network analysis (SNA) and qualitative analysis with various graphic metrics. It is illustrated that the three translators Anna Holmwood, Gigi Chang and Shelly Bryant and the publisher MacLehose Press serve as the focal actors with considerable connections with other actors in the publishing network. With further exploration of the connections, we find it is the multiple identities of these translators and the publishing strategy of the publisher that help shape their relative high centrality and visibility, which may also be one of the reasons for the success of Legends. This article hopes to complement the mainstream study on translator’s positioning and facilitate the conjunction of Translation Studies and publishing research, with rarely used but helpful techniques from graph theory and social network analysis.