Translating Chinese Art and Modern Literature examines issues in cross-cultural dialogue in connection with translation and modern Chinese art and literature from interdisciplinary perspectives. This comprises the text-image dialogue in the context of Chinese modernity, and cross-cultural interaction between modern literature in Chinese and other literatures. This edited collection approaches these issues with discrete foci and approaches, and the ten chapters in this volume are to be divided into two distinct parts. The first part highlights the mutual effects between literary texts and visual images in the media of book, painting, and film, and the second part includes contributions by scholars of literary translation.

Translating Chinese Art and Modern Literature examines issues in cross-cultural dialogue in connection with translation and modern Chinese art and literature from interdisciplinary perspectives. This comprises the text-image dialogue in the context of Chinese modernity, and cross-cultural interaction between modern literature in Chinese and other literatures. This edited collection approaches these issues with discrete foci and approaches, and the ten chapters in this volume are to be divided into two distinct parts. The first part highlights the mutual effects between literary texts and visual images in the media of book, painting, and film, and the second part includes contributions by scholars of literary translation.

Translating Chinese Culture is an innovative and comprehensive coursebook which addresses the issue of translating concepts of culture. Based on the framework of schema building, the course offers helpful guidance on how to get inside the mind of the Chinese author, how to understand what he or she is telling the Chinese-speaking audience, and how to convey this to an English speaking audience. A wide range of authentic texts relating to different aspects of Chinese culture and aesthetics are presented throughout, followed by close reading discussions of how these practices are executed and how the aesthetics are perceived among Chinese artists, writers and readers. Also taken into consideration are the mode, audience and destination of the texts. Ideas are applied from linguistics and translation studies and each discussion is reinforced with a wide variety of practical and engaging exercises. Thought-provoking yet highly accessible, Translating Chinese Culture will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students of Translation and Chinese Studies. It will also appeal to a wide range of language studies and tutors through its stimulating discussion of the principles and purposes of translation.

The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. Translating Early Modern China tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages and Latin between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and primarily in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Each chapter finds a particular translator resurrected from the past to tell the story of a text that helped shape the history of translation in China. In Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more, these texts helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. This volume explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian's craft. The book's many stories--of glossaries and official Ming translation bureaus, of bilingual Ming Chinese-Mongolian language primers, of the first Latin grammar of Manchu, of a Qing Manchu conversation manual, of a collection of Manchu poems by a Qing translator--serve as case studies that open out into questions of language and translation in China's past, of the use of fiction as a historian's tool, and of the ways that translation creates language.

Enth.: Papers presented at the first International conference on the translation of Chinese literature held in Taipei, Nov. 19-21, 1990.

In the late Qing period, from the Opium War to the 1911 revolution, China absorbed the initial impact of Western arms, manufactures, science and culture, in that order. This volume of essays deals with the reception of Western literature, on the evidence of translations made. Having to overcome Chinese assumptions of cultural superiority, the perception that the West had a literature worth notice grew only gradually. It was not until the very end of the 19th century that a translation of a Western novel ("La dame aux camelias") achieved popular acclaim. But this opened the floodgates: in the first decade of the 20th century, more translated fiction was published than original fiction.The core essays in this collection deal with aspects of this influx according to division of territory. Some take key works (e.g. Stowe s "Uncle Tom s Cabin, " Byron s The Isles of Greece ), some sample genres (science fiction, detective fiction, fables, political novels), the common attention being to the adjustments made by translators to suit the prevailing aesthetic, cultural and social norms, and/or the current needs and preoccupations of the receiving public. A broad overview of translation activities is given in the introduction.To present the subject in its true guise, that of a major cultural shift, supporting papers are included to fill in the background and to describe some of the effects of this foreign invasion on native literature. A rounded picture emerges that will be intelligible to readers who have no specialized knowledge of China.

This book examines many facets of transcultural poetics in the English translation of Chinese literature from 12 different expert contributors. Translating Chinese literature into English is a special challenge. There is a pressing need to overcome a slew of obstacles to the understanding and appreciation of Chinese literary works by readers in the English-speaking world. Hitherto only intermittent attempts have been made to theorize and explore the exact role of the translator as a cultural and aesthetic mediator informed by cross-cultural knowledge, awareness, and sensitivity. Given the complexity of literary translation, sophisticated poetics of translation in terms of literary value and aesthetic taste needs to be developed and elaborated more fully from a cross-cultural perspective. It is, therefore, necessary to examine attempts to reconcile the desire for authentic transmission of Chinese culture with the need for cultural mediation and appropriation in terms of the production and reception of texts, subject to the multiplicity of constraints, in order to shed new light on the longstanding conundrum of Chinese-English literary translation by addressing Chinese literature in the multiple contexts of nationalism, cross-cultural hybridity, literary untranslatability, the reception of translation, and also world literature. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of translation studies, Chinese literature, and East Asian studies.