ABSTRACT According to the interventionist feminist translation theory, sexist ideas found in source texts should be questioned and corrected. In some materials, signs of sexism are embodied in some unnecessary and inappropriate emphases regarding women’s gender attributes, which are almost related to certain stereotypical images. The present paper aims to explore how these problematic emphases could be treated in a feminist translation praxis applying a contrastive study of the original texts and some solutions provided by translators. To this end, the current work is designed to focus on the study of six specific cases that have been collected from Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Trilogy, a well-known Chinese science fiction novel that has sparked widespread controversy in terms of sexism. In each case, after studying the questionable original Chinese fragment, I will analyze its translations into English and Spanish to assess whether the sexism found in the source text can be attenuated or avoided after the translation process. This study will shed some light on how translators could deal with sexist emphases from a feminist approach.

ABSTRACT The present paper looks at adaptations in East Asia, which contrast with those of the West. Freely rewritten versions, particularly of Chinese literature, figured prominently in pre-modern times, an example being the cluster around Qu You’s New Tales of Trimming the Wick (1378). Stories from that collection evince the outward, transcultural movement of literary texts from China to Japan and Korea (and elsewhere). In our time, media adaptations have taken center stage, and a different cluster, that of TV adaptations of Kamio Yoko’s Boys over Flowers (1992-), exemplifies the clockwise, linear movement of adapted texts from Taiwan to China, and then to Korea. The two scenarios can be explicated with preference to the strategies of localization, recontextualization, and reinterpretation that are deployed, although localizing moves are primary. In particular, localization problematizes our understanding of the relationship of adaptations to the evolution of East Asianness. If biological adaptation is at the core of Darwinian evolution theories, according to which organisms undergo mutations in order to better survive, then textual adaptation means giving a text an “afterlife,” using changes to enhance accommodation to a new environment – in this case, a geographically close environment.

ABSTRACTAgainst the backdrop of cultural globalization, more and more Chinese films are being introduced to the Anglophone world, and Zhang Yimou’s Hero is a particularly informative case because of its huge success. The present study describes and analyzes the reception of Chinese films in the Anglophone world by conducting an in-depth case study of Hero. Drawing on sentiment analysis and corpus-based keyword analysis, we find that Hero received a positive response from both professional and general audiences in four aspects. For character, both groups preferred the complex political characters, love-hate relationships, and certain Chinese actors/actresses. For plot, both groups valued Chinese elements and the wuxia genre. Regarding the scene, both groups enjoyed the fight scenes, but the professional audiences highlighted the aesthetic value of each scene while the general audiences expressed their feelings about the beauty of the piece as a whole. Finally, in terms of translation, the professional audiences focused on the quality of subtitles, while the general audiences highlighted the modality, preferring dubbing to subtitles. This positive but differentiated reception between professional and general audiences can be attributed to cultural discounting, cultural hybridity, cultural memory, translation modalities and translation quality.

ABSTRACT The question of “How translation is done” is crucial in the field of translation studies as it serves as the foundation for both teaching and criticism. To address this question, one must theoretically explain the methodology behind translation activities, including how translators select methods, strategies, and techniques to achieve meaningful translations. Despite the existence of various cross-disciplinary paradigms in translation studies, a consensus has not yet been reached on this issue. According to Activity Theorists, a socio-cultural activity is realized through goal-directed actions that are ultimately carried out by conditioned operations. Based on this perspective, we propose an explanatory framework for understanding the methodology of translation activity. This framework may also be useful for revising and evaluating the output of automatic translation operations conducted by AI language models.

ABSTRACT Translingual practice in a historical context conceptualizes translation as travel; when examined in a social network, translation can be perceived as an innovative force of knowledge-making. This study is concerned with the travels of a critical artistic term in Medieval China: qiyun shengdong. Predicated on their distinct connotations, Xie He combined the meanings of qi and yun to refer to the vitality evinced in the human body, as well as the beauty of the talent and elegance emanating from the posture. Sinologists such as Herbert Giles and Laurence Binyon translated and introduced the term based on the Western cultural milieu, making qiyun commensurate with “rhythm,” eventually developing the mainstream translation of “rhythmic vitality.” With an examination of the rewriting and repositioning of qiyun from Binyon to Vortex leaders Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis as well as Roger Fry, a key member of the Bloomsbury circle and the pioneering modernist and formalist, the emergence of modernist discourse is highlighted with translation as an agent. This research will expose the understated process of knowledge formation through translation across cultures by analyzing the travel and reception of the term qiyun shengdong to recapture translation as an influential aspect of artistic innovation.

ABSTRACT Despite the ups and downs in their relationship, China and Japan have been engaged in a process of cultural exchange for nearly two millennia. A recent outcome of this interaction has been the discourse surrounding the founder of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881-1936), his foremost exponent in 20th century Japan, the writer and thinker Takeuchi Yoshimi 竹内好 (1910-1977) and the effect of their interaction ever since on intellectuals in both countries. This is an interaction which had substantial influence on the intellectual climate in post-war Japan and still plays a role in intellectual discourse in contemporary China, particularly in the debates surrounding modernity and nationalism. I have worked with Joshua Fogel in making the first translation into English of Takeuchi’s classic monograph Ro Jin (1944) into English from the Japanese. In the process, we have attained new insights into historical and contemporary intellectual developments in both countries, as well as a deepening understanding of “Takeuchi’s Lu Xun”. I have also examined two rival translations into Chinese by Li Xifeng 李心峰 (1986) and Li Dongmu 李冬木 (2005) from the angle of fidelity to the original and readability.

ABSTRACT The classic Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng is renowned for portraying a verifiable world with various characters. Previous scholars of translation studies demonstrated a lopsided interest towards the translated Hong Lou Meng texts without highly considering the translator’s experience in perusing the original fiction. The current study endeavours to integrate narratology and sociological theory with translation studies by referring to The Story of the Stone: A Translator’s Notebooks, which aims to examine the translator David Hawkes’s mental state of aesthetic illusion as an observer before translating Hong Lou Meng. Specifically, Hawkes was postulated to be both the translator and reader immersed in the imaginary setting of Hong Lou Meng to observe the personas. Simultaneously, Hawkes remained a certain distance from the fictional world to enable pinpointing of the author’s inconsistencies through professional habitus, which is critical to resolving the source text inconsistencies while translating.

ABSTRACT This intercultural research addresses the challenges of standardizing translation of mystical philosophical terminologies. Mystical texts make a connection between the transcendent, the essentially unknowable Absolute, and the finite human being. They attempt to communicate through words what is indescribable. As such, the language they employ is symbolic and ambiguous. This leads to inconsistent and at times conflicting translations of terminologies. A text, “Commentary on the Tradition of the Hidden Treasure,” which summarizes and comments on various Sufi perspectives on the process of creation and the ontological relationship between the world of existence and its divine origin, as well as providing psychosocial interpretations, is used as a case study for explaining contexts of important mystical terminologies. Comparing various English and Chinese translations of terms by prominent translators and scholars of Sufi texts should help translators of such texts appreciate the complexity of mystical language, adopt certain existing translations, or propose alternatives.