Translation as vaccination: The political dialectics of translation under Chairman Mao

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Chairman Mao’s era, the politics of Chinese translation in general and literary translation in particular was played out in various and often incomprehensible forms. This was largely due to Mao’s conception of translation as political vaccination, which was derived from his political dialectics that had, in turn, been developed from diverse political and philosophical sources. By revisiting what actually happened to translation in the China of the time, the article examines Mao’s problematic and self-contradictory dialectics that constituted the larger Chinese context, which created different dimensions of the politics of translation, in an attempt to draw attention to what might be termed the political dialectics of translation.