James St. André applies the perspective of cross-identity performance to the translation of a wide variety of Chinese texts into English and French from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Drawing on scholarship in cultural studies, queer studies, and anthropology, the author argues that many cross-identity performance techniques, including blackface, passing, drag, mimicry, and masquerade, provide insights into the history of translation practice. He makes a strong case for situating translation in its historical, social, and cultural milieu, reading translated texts alongside a wide variety of other materials that helped shape the image of “John Chinaman.” A reading of the life and works of George Psalmanazar, whose cross-identity performance as a native of Formosa enlivened early eighteenth-century salons, opens the volume and provides a bridge between the book’s theoretical framework and its examination of Chinese-European interactions. The core of the book consists of a chronological series of cases, each of which illustrates the use of a different type of cross-identity performance to better understand translation practice. St. André provides close readings of early pseudotranslations, including Marana’s Turkish Spy (1691) and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762), as well as adaptations of Hatchett’s The Chinese Orphan (1741) and Voltaire’s Orphelin de la Chine (1756). Later chapters explore Davis’s translation of Sorrows of Han (1829) and genuine translations of nonfictional material mainly by employees of the East India Company. The focus then shifts to oral/aural aspects of early translation practice in the nineteenth century using the concept of mimicry to examine interactions between Pidgin English and translation in the popular press. Finally, the work of two early modern Chinese translators, Gu Hongming and Lin Yutang, is examined as masquerade. Offering an original and innovative study of genres of writing that are traditionally examined in isolation, St. André’s work provides a fascinating examination of the way three cultures interacted through the shifting encounters of fiction, translation, and nonfiction and in the process helped establish and shape the way Chinese were represented. The book represents a major contribution to translation studies, Chinese cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and gender criticism.

Essays exploring the effect of time on translation studies This volume brings together 12 essays on the relation between temporality and translation, engaging in both theoretical reflection and consideration of concrete case studies. The essays can be read independently, but three major themes run through them and facilitate a discussion about the many ways in which the theoretical and practical consideration of temporality may provide new insights and research directions for translation studies. The first main theme is temporal metaphors for translation. Why do so few metaphors that describe translation relate to time? How have the few metaphors relating to time that have been used impacted the development of the field? What new metaphors might be useful? The second theme is the relation between translation and modernity as a new experience of temporality. In China, as in many countries outside Europe, the passage to modernity has been inextricably bound up in the act of translation, either of European texts into Chinese as a way of "importing" modernity or the translation of Chinese texts into European languages as a gauge of quality and a sign that China has become modern. Third is the translation of temporality and the competing temporalities of source and target texts. How are the nuances of temporality translated, and how do any shifts that occur affect the meaning of the translation? Different cultures have different concepts of time; Nida famously gave the example of a South American language where the past is seen as existing in front of a person while the future is behind them, because they know ("see") the past but cannot know the future. Several essays engage with these and related issues.

This book explores the deep-rooted anxiety about foreign otherness manifest through translation in modern China in its endeavours to engage in cross-cultural exchanges. It offers to theorize and contextualize a related range of issues concerning translation practice in response to foreign otherness. The book also introduces new vistas to some of the under-explored aspects of translation practice concerning ideology and cultural politics from the late Qing dynasty to the present day. Largely as a result of translation, ethnocentric beliefs and feelings have given way to a more open and liberal way to approach and appropriate foreign otherness. However, the fear of Westernization, seen as a threat to Chinese cultural integrity and social stability, is still shown sporadically through the state’s ideological control over translation. The book interprets, questions and reformulates a number of the key theoretical issues in Translation Studies and also demonstrates their ramifications in a bid to shed light on Chinese translation practice.

This book develops interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to analyzing the cross-cultural travels of traditional Chinese fiction. It ties this genre to issues such as translation, world literature, digital humanities, book culture, and images of China. Each chapter offers a case study of the historical and cultural conditions under which traditional Chinese fiction has traveled to the English-speaking world, proposing a critical lens that can be used to explain these cross-cultural encounters. The book seeks to identify connections between traditional Chinese fiction and other cultures that create new meanings and add to the significance of reading, teaching, and studying these classical novels and stories in the English-speaking world. Scholars, students, and general readers who are interested in traditional Chinese fiction, translation studies, and comparative and world literature will find this book useful.

This groundbreaking work is the first full book-length publication to critically engage in the emerging field of research on the queer aspects of translation and interpreting studies. The volume presents a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives through fifteen contributions from both established and up-and-coming scholars in the field to demonstrate the interconnectedness between translation and queer aspects of sex, gender, and identity. The book begins with the editors’ introduction to the state of the field, providing an overview of both current and developing lines of research, and builds on this foundation to look at this research more closely, grouped around three different sections: Queer Theorizing of Translation; Case Studies of Queer Translations and Translators; and Queer Activism and Translation. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to not only shed light on this promising field of research but also to promote cross fertilization between these disciplines towards further exploring the intersections between queer studies and translation studies, making this volume key reading for students and scholars interested in translation studies, queer studies, politics, and activism, and gender and sexuality studies.

This collected volume focuses on the history of Western translation of premodern Chinese texts from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Divided into three parts, nine chapters feature close readings of translated texts, micro-studies of how three translations came into being, and broad-based surveys that inquire into the causes of historical change. Among the specific questions addressed are: What stylistic, generic, and discursive permutations were undergone by Chinese texts as they crossed linguistic borders? Who were the main agents in this centuries-long effort to transmit Chinese culture to the West? How did readership considerations affect the form that particular translations take? More generally, the contributors are concerned with the relevance of current research paradigms, like those of World Literature, transcultural reception, and the rewriting of translation history.

The essays in this anthology deal with translation studies in a global/local context and from a Chinese perspective. Topics such as globalisation, postcolonial theory, diaspora writing, polysystem theory and East/West comparative literary and cultural studies are all discussed.