ABSTRACT Cross-lingual learning provides an excellent chance for knowledge transfer across multiple languages. However, the substantial resource disparity between high- and low-resource languages creates considerable issues. This study focuses on two Indic language families, Indo-Aryan, and Dravidian, as well as a definitely endangered low-resource language that often lacks the extensive training data available in high-resource languages, such as English. We present a unique approach termed Resource-Aware Multimodal Translation (RAMT), which combines large language models with vision-based character recognition to improve translation efficacy across a range of resource levels. RAMT uses the Continuous Wavelet Transform to translate low-resource text into a spatial representation, enabling a plug-and-play training process. This method streamlines the training process across multiple languages, reducing reliance on large datasets and enhancing model portability. In addition, our method captures sequential dependencies and spatial properties in the text, which improves stroke extraction and inter-character interactions. Empirical assessments of seven languages demonstrate considerable gains in both performance and processing speed, demonstrating RAMT’s usefulness in bridging the resource gap in cross-lingual applications. Our findings demonstrate that this integrated technique promotes more equitable language processing solutions, paving the way for improved access and comprehension in low-resource linguistic environments.

ABSTRACT Jeremy Tiang is a Singaporean writer, playwright, and literary translator based in New York who has translated contemporary writers from across the Sinophone world and received international acclaim, including being longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize. This interview centers on Tiang’s translation strategies and the publishing process. It exhibits the artistry involved in introducing Chinese literature to the Anglophone world across diverse genres and accommodating the idiosyncratic styles of different writers. Tiang elaborates on inhabiting the dual identities of writer and reader as the foundation of literary translation, the challenges of introducing unfamiliar contexts to new audiences, and the interplay of translatorial, authorial and editorial interventions in text and paratext. His reflections provide valuable insights for scholars interested in contemporary Chinese literary translation, addressing theoretical concerns such as translation action theory, the publishers’ consideration of economic and social capital, and the practical aspects of translation.

ABSTRACT This paper examines omission strategies in Ahdaf Soueif’s English translation of Mourid Barghouti’s seminal autobiographical work, Ra’aytu Ramallah. Through a comparative and analytical methodology, this study investigates their impact on the text’s political, cultural, and emotional effects. Instances of omission are analyzed under four key themes: the management of repetition, the excision of descriptive granularity and authorial subjectivity, the neutralization of colonial markers and resistance narratives, and the dilution of Palestinian cultural specificity. The paper argues that while some omissions addressing linguistic differences seem justifiable, a pattern emerges where omissions substantially diminish the narrative’s depth and political acuity. These omissions veil the realities of exile under occupation, diminish the emotional depth shaped by trauma and resilience, silence critiques of colonial structures, and contribute to the erasure of Palestinian cultural identity in Anglophone reception. The analysis explores how these translational choices reshape the reader’s encounter with Barghouti’s testimony, hindering a full appreciation of its interplay between personal memory and collective history. The study concludes by emphasizing the critical need for heightened fidelity and contextual sensitivity in translating Palestinian narratives, advocating for strategies that preserve the source text’s integrity and political significance within the fraught context of representation and historical struggle.

ABSTRACT This paper introduces the concept of the retranslation of geography. It integrates Italiano’s concept of “translation of geographies” with Jakobson’s notion of “intersemiotic translation” to examine how geographical imaginations are retranslated across cultures, media, and time. Drawing on Sun and He’s three geospace translation strategies – retention, reconstruction, and substitution – as analytical tools, this research takes Thomas More’s Utopia 1 as a case study. It aims to explore how Utopian space has been retranslated in English and Chinese contexts, highlighting the strategies employed and the motivations behind them. Within the English context, the research focuses on cross-media retranslation, analyzing the intersemiotic retranslations of Utopia from text to book covers between 1965 and 2018. These visual reinterpretations reveal evolving perceptions of Utopian space over time. In the Chinese context, the study examines cross-cultural retranslation, tracing the movement of Utopian space from its Western origins into an Eastern cultural framework. Utopian space has been reinterpreted through various Chinese ideal worlds, such as the Taoist小国寡民 (Little Country with a Small Population), the Buddhist华严界 (Flower Bank World), and the Confucian大同 (the Great Unity).

ABSTRACT The study examines a special case where migrants living and working in Beijing known as beipiao (lit. floating in Beijing) are translated by Eric Abrahamsen, a beipiao translator. In translating Running through Beijing by award-winning writer Xu Zechen, he imbues the translation with his personal beipiao experience by creatively reshaping the host city of Beijing, migrants’ old home and migratory closure. With his personal knowledge of Beijing traversing into the fictional world to accentuate displaced beipiao migrants’ out-of-place engagement with the host environment in their daily search of belonging and identity, and through an empathetic reconfiguration of a haunting home that impedes a cosmopolitan severance from their rural past, the translator proceeds to proactively rewrite the climactic migratory closure that anchors beipiao characters in the perpetuating space of migratory in-betweenness. The translation epitomizes the significance of experiential rewriting by translators to merge their cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally charged experience with characters whose identity and experience they share or used to share, creating new, competing narratives that inspire, probably with greater effects, migrant relatability and empathy in readers.

ABSTRACT The transmission of core conceptual metaphors by translators is of great significance for the cross-cultural communication of Confucianism. Taking Roger T. Ames’s translation of The Analects of Confucius as the research object, this paper uses the online platform Wmatrix semantic annotation tool to comprehensively retrieve and identify core conceptual metaphors, describes the translator’s cross-cultural metaphor transmission strategies and characteristics from three aspects: cultural schema, cultural image, and cultural meaning, and explores the effects and reasons of the translator’s interpretive translation. The research findings show that the translator adopts a cultural-interpretive strategy grounded in comparative philosophy, aiming to bridge Chinese and Western philosophical perspectives and to establish a dialogical relationship between the translator and the text. This strategy is reflected in three aspects: (1) interpreting the cultural schema of metaphors to construct the cosmological context of process zoetology; (2) enhancing metaphorical imagery to express the moral vision of the interconnected universe; and (3) foregrounding the cultural significance of metaphors to shape Ames’s framework of comparative philosophical interpretation. Ames’s metaphorical interpretation of core concepts revolves around the three root metaphors of Chinese culture: plant growth as human-becoming, way-waking as practice of morality, and family-regulation as state-governance isomorphism. This study offers a reference model for the cross-cultural transmission of metaphors for core philosophical concepts.

ABSTRACT The paper examines the politics of translating Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems (2004) into Gujarati and its implications for postcolonial agentive action. It explores the multiple ways in which the subversive potential of postcolonial translation can be deployed more productively by translating in local languages than by translating back to the Empire. The subversion relates to the inversion of relationships between languages caught in translation, exploration of the theme of migration without colonialism as a point of reference, and critical engagement with the idea of nation-building. The urban metropolis of Mumbai becomes an alibi for the translator to raise questions about the migration, marginalization, and ruthless mauling of the fragments of the nation in his hometown Ahmedabad. Strategies of translation like foregrounding of multilinguality, multiple versions of the same poem, and so on rendered a modernist poet like Arun Kolatkar almost unrecognizable in Gujarati, but they served a major postcolonial function i.e. to challenge absolutism and essentialism permeating socio-literary and political cultures.

ABSTRACT This research examines how collaborative learning in translation crowdsourcing environments enhances students’ conditional knowledge and associated metacognitive regulation. The study incorporated the Global Voices Lingua project into an undergraduate translation course, employing a structured intervention where senior students worked in mixed-ability triads. Through a four-step collaborative process, participants first completed individual Chinese translations of English news articles, documenting their problem-solving and decision-making processes. They then participated in recorded group discussions to address shared and individual translation challenges. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed significant improvements in situational awareness through collaborative efforts, with 31% of contextualised problems and 53% of decontextualised problems demonstrating increased awareness post-collaboration. The analysis of group interactions highlighted that successful collaborations were predominantly marked by shared (50%) and co-constructed (37.3%) interactions. Groups with balanced participation and flexible leadership roles, particularly when addressing complex textual elements, exhibited superior problem-solving abilities and deeper metacognitive awareness. Moreover, the findings revealed a notable shift from monitoring-based to evaluation-centric approaches in metacognitive strategy use, illustrating how authentic translation tasks can foster sophisticated decision-making. These insights provide valuable implications for designing collaborative activities in translation education and enhancing understanding of group dynamics in professional translation practice.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the translation and rewriting of Cubist art in China between 1917 and 1949, with a focus on the reframing of its “abstract” concepts as “realism” within the Chinese context. The study is organized chronologically into three sections: first, it analyzes how 1920s critics redefined Cubist “abstraction” as a realistic representation of nature; second, it explores the integration of realist discourse into narratives of Western modernist abstract painting; finally, it investigates the dual reception of Picasso in China. While leftist intellectuals in the 1930s criticized Cubism, Picasso’s later association with the French Communist Party and his antifascist stance fostered admiration among Chinese intellectuals, which helped to revitalize interest in his work post-World War II. This shift led the artistic community to reevaluate Picasso through a realist lens and ultimately portrayed him as a “people’s artist.” By analyzing the translation and rewriting of Cubist narratives, this paper elucidates the deconstruction of abstract concepts in China and the formation of “Chinese Cubism.”