ABSTRACT The practice of transediting classic English novels for children is common in China, but remains under-researched. From a narratological perspective, this article explores this practice through a case study of Gulliver’s Travels. It first identifies the factors, including the view of childhood, common presuppositions of the features of children’s literature, censorship, and the mainstream educational philosophy in China, that may influence this practice. Then, it finds that the Chinese children’s editions of Gulliver’s Travels experience noticeable changes both on the story and discourse level, such as the excision of scenes that reflect satirical criticism and the shift from indirect speech to direct speech. Lastly, it points out that although the observed changes are understandable, some seem inappropriate for the target young Chinese readers due to the ignorance of the differences in children’s literature for readers of different ages. Therefore, this article suggests that literature for young readers aged 11 to 16 should challenge them cognitively and affectively, be somewhat subversive, and present a complete picture of the reality, and that translators of children’s literature should truly put themselves in the position of children and consider the needs of young readers of different ages.

ABSTRACT This paper begins by posing the following questions: Who are the subaltern in the global present? What refigurations has the concept of subalternity undergone since its inaugural use in Antonio Gramsci’s writing? What does a genealogical account of such revisions and discontinuities suggest? Can the subaltern speak or be heard in a digital world? Why translate for the subaltern? If translation is an impossible necessity, what risks and pitfalls are encountered in translation for the subaltern? What potential does a politically empowering ethics of translation offer for surmounting such obstacles? Using these questions as a point of departure, this paper proceeds to explore how in the age of digital media communications the previously colonized or subalternized are further hegemonized, and what mechanisms are involved when digital imperialism is further marginalizing and silencing the subaltern. If the history of colonialism has witnessed translation being manipulated as a vehicle to achieve and maintain domination and control, the paper argues, then translation can also serve as a powerful site or tool for repairing social injustice and epistemic or representational violence against the subaltern, and therefore help enable the subaltern to speak for themselves and be heard sympathetically and respectfully.

ABSTRACT Previous researches exploring transcultural feminist knowledge transfer by means of translation pay little attention to translation flows in Asian countries. This study demonstrates what happened when a Korean radical feminist movement, 4B/6B4T, was exported to China through translation in an online environment. The Korean practitioners of 4B/6B4T have adopted several commitments, which have also travelled to China. The manner in which one of these commitments – 비돕비 (bidopbi, those who exercise 4 or 6B help those who exercise 4 or 6B) – should be translated into Chinese became a matter of controversy on Chinese social media. This study applies the sociological narrative theory to probe this translation debate and its embedded narratives. Moreover, the article employs the notions of fidelity and infidelity to discuss feminist activism in the context of translating 6B4T’s commitments as a whole. The study considers feminist knowledge translation as a form of re-narration and intellectual activism that can be used to consciously strengthen the ideological agendas of feminist individuals. It argues that translation activism, when carried out in a feminist activist context via social media, can be understood as generative; it is enacted through the dynamic process of negotiating the mediators’ narrative affinities.

ABSTRACT Yu Kwang-chung embarked on a translational project, Anthology of American Poetry, around 1960. Edited by Stephen Soong, the anthology was published by World Today Press, Hong Kong, in 1961. This research commences with Yu’s plight in selecting what poems of Dickinson’s to translate, a plight associated with Poundian translatology. It follows with textual analyses of Yu’s translations of and introduction to Dickinson’s poetry. I aruge that Yu is far from being an absolutist inasmuch as translational fidelity is concerned. In contrast, what he pursues in poetry translation is an optimal fidelity, one that intends to bring about as profuse poetics as possible in the target language. The translator exerts optimal faithfulness to a variety of traditional literary elements, all of which amount to what I call “fidelity to the deep structure of literature.” It is with such a flexible fidelity that Yu transplants Dickinson’s metaphysical universe onto the Chinese soil.

ABSTRACT Whether readers decide to accept or reject the translation of foreign literary works depends on a variety of linguistic, literary, cultural and social factors. This paper attempts to explore how the collaborative approach between an interpreter and a writer can effectively address these interrelated factors that constrain the reception of translations of foreign literary works through a case study of Wei Yi and Lin Shu’s translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the early twentieth-century China. By leveraging their respective expertise as an interpreter and a writer, they rewrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the linguistic, literary, cultural and social landscape of China through various translation strategies such as additions, deletions, abridgments and adaptations. The paper argues that Wei Yi and Lin Shu’s collaboration as an interpreter and a writer facilitated a more appropriate contextualisation and reception of the Chinese translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin among the target readership in the early twentieth-century Chinese landscape. By studying the collaboration between an interpreter and a writer in rewriting a foreign novel, this research is expected to provide some valuable insights into literary translation across different countries.

ABSTRACT This interview was conducted face-to-face at the University of Manchester. The focus of the interview between Hua Tan and Dr. Anna Strowe, the Book Reviews Editor for Translation Studies, was on how to write good academic book reviews, especially for translation studies. Academic book reviews play an important role in academic communication. They introduce and evaluate newly published academic works and provide a forum for academics to evaluate each other’s research. In the eyes of many scholars, book reviews are easy to write and publish. Yet, a good academic book review is not that easy to write. Dr. Anna Strowe held that academic book reviews are not confined to fixed structures, but vary from text to text and reviewer to reviewer. In her opinion, the evaluation of the book reviewed or the critical comment on it, or in a different term, the intellectual engagement, is the most important for a good book review. She suggested that young scholars build up their networks and read many book reviews first before starting to write one.

ABSTRACT With a growing increase in the study on multimodality, translation scholars begin to take the visual mode into account. Comics, as a typical kind of multimodal texts which combine image and words, can be considered as multimodal meaning construction. In comics translation, multimodality could serve as a resource for translation. Drawing on studies of visual grammar, image-text relations and re-instantiation, this paper adopts an approach which encompasses both verbal and visual aspects of the meaning to investigate the translation of comics. By analyzing examples from Zhuang Zi Speaks: The Music of Nature, it aims to explore how semiotic resources are exploited in translation and how the visual meaning affects the re-instantiation of the target text. It is found that comics translation is a process of multimodal meaning re-instantiation with visual meaning largely activated in the process, motivating changes in actual choices of the verbal and justifying the strategies of condensation, addition and liberal translation. Correspondingly, the image-text relationships have undergone modifications, achieving better visual-verbal coherence. This research has extended both multimodal and translation studies, shedding a new light on translation as re-instantiation and validating the potential of visual mode as a resource for translation.

ABSTRACT This interview took place on the ZOOM platform on 29 July 2022. The focus of the interview between Gaosheng Deng and Joel Martinsen, the translator of The Dark Forest and Cixin Liu’s other Sci-fi, was on the habitus and subjectivity of translators. Since Toury introduced the concept of norms into translation studies, most translation practices can be explained by using norms. The role of translation norms was reinforced by habitus. Translators embody their habitus and translation style formed by their externalization in translation, which includes the selection of translation materials, translation strategies, and translator’s understanding of the essence of translation, all of which represent various translation norms. The main topics covered in the interview include the social path taken by translators before entering the translation industry, the translator’s style, the process of translation, revision, and the differences between Chinese and Western culture, allowing readers and researchers to learn more about the external social norms that has shaped the translator’s habitus.

ABSTRACT In the pandemic era, the efficient management of COVID-19 by public health authorities is dependent upon the effective dissemination of health-related information. Due to the global nature of COVID-19, translations of healthcare information from the source language to the languages of target users are common. The current study discusses the findings from a comparative corpus analysis of a self-built corpus based on the translated version of eHealth information and the Coronavirus corpus, which contains 12 million words and serves as a reference corpus. Revealing a significant difference between the two corpora, the study shows that the overall sentence complexity of translated texts is significantly lower than non-translated texts even though it deploys longer length of production. The results also show that the translated e-Health information encompasses less coordination structures. In addition, the findings regarding the use of subordination and specific structures are rather mixed and the translated texts appear to be less complicated in the measure of T-units per sentence and verb phrases per T-unit. This study highlights that critical information such as medication adherence must be communicated clearly and understandably to the general public. The findings of the study offer support for the use of plain English in the dissemination material provided by the websites of the leading healthcare public institutions

ABSTRACT As an important type of cognitive metaphor, spatial metaphors are a demonstration of the unique environment and mind of characters in fiction. Therefore, the translation of spatial metaphors is not only the translation of language but also the reproduction of their spatial consciousness and perception. Drawing on cognitive stylistics, this paper studies whether the spatial metaphors in Chen’ai luoding are “downtoned” in the English translation, Red Poppies, by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, as is the case in most metaphor translation. Spatial metaphors carrying political, ethical and spiritual elements in Chen’ai luoding are discussed in terms of three dimensions: POWER IS HEIGHT, RELATION IS DISTANCE and HEAD IS A CONTAINER. The study finds that the source domains of the spatial metaphors in Red Poppies are reinforced, which is different from common practice in metaphor translation. The cases exemplified in this paper illustrate that lexical addition, syntactic adaptation and visualisation are effective ways to strengthen the effects of spatial metaphor and to realise its translation.