XU Jinglei’s Chinese domestication of Stefan Zweig’s Brief einer Unbekannten

Abstract

This article investigates XU Jinglei’s Chinese cinematic adaptation (2004) of Stefan Zweig’s novella Brief einer Unbekannten (1922) from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining translation and adaptation studies. Relocating the Austrian story to a politically tumultuous time in Chinese history (1930–48), XU’s adaptation is a process of re-contextualization and domestication, in the traditional terminology of translation studies that erases the Other’s traits and presents a domestic (self) story against a completely Chinese background. This article argues that XU’s adaptation can also be described as localization, as she prioritizes her own artistic purposes and the expectations of a Chinese audience over fidelity to the source text.