USIS-funded literary translation in Hong Kong in the Cultural Cold War: a study of literary translations in World Today (1949-1952)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has witnessed a burgeoning interest in the interwoven relationship between Cold War Studies and Translation Studies. However, Hong Kong during the Cold War remains largely neglected. Hong Kong in the 1950s had a political significance from a temporal and spatial perspective and was the scene where the British colonizer, the United States Information Services (USIS) and Communist China fought a hidden battle. World Today, a less studied but major periodical that was sponsored by the USIS in Hong Kong, was published between 1949 and the 1980s. This paper investigates the literary translations in World Today from 1949 to 1952, and finds that they were part of the US propaganda and cultural war against Communist China. These foreign literary works, chiefly American literature and writings on the US, were characterized by appropriation and mediation through the purposeful selection of translated literary works from the outset and selective manipulation within the text via omissions and alterations thereafter.