Chinese Translation Studies in the 21st Century

Current Trends and Emerging Perspectives

Roberto Valdeon, Roberto A. Valdeon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351856973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Chinese Translation Studies in the 21st Century, which presents a selection of some of the best articles published in the journal Perspectives in a five-year period (2012-2017), highlights the vitality of Translation Studies as a profession and as a field of enquiry in China. As the country has gradually opened up to the West, translation academic programmes have burgeoned to cater for the needs of Chinese corporations and political institutions.

The book is divided into four sections, in which authors explore theoretical and conceptual issues (such as the connection between translation and adaptation, multimodality, and the nature of norms), audiovisual translation (including studies on news translation and the translation of children's movies), bibliographies and bibliometrics (to assess, for example, the international visibility of Chinese scholars), and interpreting (analyzing pauses in simultaneous interpreting and sign language among other aspects). The book brings together well-established authors and younger scholars from universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

The chapters in this book were originally published in various issues of Perspectives: Studies in Translatology.

A survey of the ‘new’ discipline of adaptation studies: between translation and interculturalism

Leo Chan

Department of Translation, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Literary scholars and historians have long noted a strong tendency in all human societies to rewrite original texts, ending in the production of adaptations that are only loosely connected to their sources. In our age, however, attention has also been drawn to the way these adaptations serve as carriers of cultural subjects and formations that are transmitted through various media, verbal (literary) as well as visual (filmic). Reviewing the research of the past several decades, one might say the study of adaptation as a means whereby cultures cross national and linguistic boundaries has flourished through the work done by scholars of film adaptations, intercultural theatre and children’s literature. However, for some time translation theorists have actually been exploring the theoretical underpinnings of adaptations while providing the methodological tools for close textual investigation. On the other hand, adaptations are also a key area of inquiry for researchers in intercultural studies, which focuses on the interactive relationship between elements belonging to two cultures. Adaptation is, in effect, a translational as well as intercultural mode.

In their succinct definition of the scope and meaning of ‘interculturality’ in the introductory essay to a recent issue of Journal of Intercultural Studies, Suzi Adams and Michael Janover note two contrasting approaches to the study of the contemporary ‘clash of civilizations’: either ‘the cultural “other” is reduced to the identity of the “self” or “the same”’, or ‘“cultural otherness” is envisaged as alterity, as unbridgeable and ultimately untranslatable’ (Adams & Janover, 2009, p. 227). The dichotomy can be expressed in a number of paired terms, each of which encapsulates one aspect of the dialectical relationship between two possible avenues to studying intercultural processes: sameness versus difference, acculturation versus alienation, domestication versus foreignization, translatability versus untranslatability, oneness versus diversity, and so on. Adams and Janover sum it up as a distinction between a focus on ‘between worlds’ and one on ‘multiple worlds’ (2009, p. 228), and refrain from commenting on which approach is superior or more influential. One may argue, however, that if the suffix ‘inter-’ in intercultural studies suggests ‘between-ness’,¹ then there should not be a place for the multiple-worlds approach, where cultures are viewed as separate and unbridgeable. The bridging of worlds in contact with each other has been a key concern in our time, seen in fields like globalization studies, multicultural studies, and translation studies. A disciplinary newcomer, adaptation studies also concerns itself with the many manifestations of the ‘trans-cultural’ elements that cross cultural boundaries, become ‘translated’, and absorb into the new cultural settings.

Perspectives on adaptation studies

For a long time, literary scholars and historians have noted a tendency in all human societies to rewrite original texts, ending in the production of adaptations that are closely or loosely connected to their sources. Adaptations, as works derived – sometimes even bent and twisted – from a stated source, have been with us since ancient times. A diversity of examples is shown in Boldt, Federici, and Virgulti’s anthology (2010), which includes articles dealing with pre-modern adaptations, including Samuel Johnson’s ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, an eighteenth-century adaptation of a Latin poem, Shakespeare’s ‘adaptation’ of King Leir as King Lear, Jonathan D. Syss’s use of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a model for The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), Charlotte Bronte’s reworking of Pamela (1740) into Jane Eyre (1847) and, even earlier, Titian’s painting ‘Diana and Actaeon’ (1559), an early example of a transformed version of Ovid’s myth as collected in Metamorphosis. The history of derivative literature in China has been an equally long one (c.f. Kao, 1985); many methods of adapting literary precedents deployed by Chinese poets, dramatists, and storytellers were witnessed over the centuries. It is only in our age that attention has been strongly focused on the way adaptations serve as carriers of cultural subjects and formations that are transmitted through various media, verbal (literary) as well as visual (filmic), especially the latter.

In the research of the past several decades, the study of adaptation as a mode whereby cultures cross national and linguistic boundaries has flourished on the basis of distinctive work carried out by several groups of scholars. First, an explosion of theoretical works has dealt with adaptations into the new media of film and television. Often simply designated as ‘adaptation studies’ (though ‘film adaptation studies’ would be more appropriate), this sub-discipline began with the analysis of films based on novels, as pioneered by a spate of publications dating from the 1990s by scholars like James Naremore (2000) and Robert Stam (2005), as well as book-length studies of screen adaptations of, most notably, works by Jane Austen and Henry James. While instances of literature-into-film are innumerable and inexhaustible, such a focus is nevertheless restrictive. The cases of two recently-launched journals are indicative. Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies, launched as recently as 2008, devotes primary attention to filmic adaptations of novels,² as does The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, its first issue appearing in 2007. Both still fall short of disciplinary openness, since they only draw on the expertise of subject specialists in literature and film departments (cf. Raw, 2009, pp. 72–74). A vocal critic of this brand of adaptation studies is Costas Constandinides (2010), who points out the limitations of Stam, who fails, among other things, to consider cases of adaptation into new digital media like video games.

Although one can easily point to film adaptation scholars’ neglect of adaptations based on sources other than the novel, like comic books, graphic novels, play scripts, and reportage literature, there is also no doubt that they have shown a desire to move beyond the old mould. On the one hand, they encourage rethinking about ‘intermediality’, shifting research interest away from textual transformations within one medium to the interlocking relationship between the printed and the visual. While film-to-film remakes (like the new versions of The Postman Always Rings Twice, King Kong, Alfie, and Psycho) are still discussed as topics of interest, they are balanced against a growing interest in text-to-image transformations, and even in text-to-multimodal (text plus image) presentations. On the other hand, a parallel shift can be observed in the movement from a focus on ‘between media’ to one on ‘between cultures’. This shift to an intercultural emphasis is crucial, seen most conspicuously in the analysis of cross-cultural film-to-film remakes. What this signifies is a redirection of research emphasis from West-West to East-West. Where, previously, examples involving the adaptation of films within one country have occupied a central position, those involving two are now taking up center stage. What is more, trans-Atlantic adaptations have been eclipsed by trans-Pacific ones in the adaptive mode. The most prominent examples are Hollywood adaptations of movies from Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong (like The Ring and The Departed).³ Adaptation thus figures as a quintessentially intercultural project.

Scholars of contemporary postmodernist drama have paid attention to ‘adapted’ plays that successfully enter – and become integrated into – target cultural environments. Their interest begins with the verbal play texts, but they also highlight innovative features added to a dramatic text when it is presented in places/cultures other than those of the original. The ‘Little Theatre’ Movement in Taiwan is one indicative instance. Building on the work of Patrice Pavis (1996) on intercultural theatre, Iris H. Tuan (2007) analyzes adapted and performed drama in the past two decades, such as Wu Xin-chu’s Slut Antigone, Richard Schechner’s Oresteia, and Wu Xin-kuo’s The Kingdom of Desire (Macbeth), to show the artistic strategies whereby Greek and Shakespearean plays are rendered in Chinese: Beijing opera styles, the local Fukienese dialect, Hakka costumes, etc., are substituted for those of the original. In Tuan’s view, adaptation is a measure of how, with the advent of globalization, the Other can be (inter)corporated into the Self, the West into the East, and vice versa. Tuan looks into the future and projects that, ‘on the basis of equal cultural interaction, more plays can be adapted in an appropriate way’ (Yuan, 2007, p. 153).

Another critic with an interest in dramatic performance, Catherine T.C. Diamond (1993), proceeds by first classifying four types of adaptations in her Ph.D. thesis: the generic (e.g. fiction into film), the diachronic (e.g. the contemporary Puerto Rican context for West Side Story), the ideological (e.g. Brecht rewriting an old Chinese play as The Chalk Circle), and the cross-cultural. In the last category she places the ‘Little Theatre’ Movement. With this as the locus of her discussion, Diamond gives a detailed examination of the mediating role that adapted dramas can play between cultures. While applauding the potentialities opened up for cross-cultural interaction by drama adaptations – since they can cross borders and become the familiar – she is nevertheless sceptical about two practices conventionally considered to be at the borders of adaptation: imitation and translation. To her, imitation is close to plagiarism and can only occur within the same art system (Diamond, 1993, p. 158), while translation constitutes only the initial stage of adaptation (‘only part of the adaption process’), its stigma being ‘an attempt at faithfulness toward the original text’ (Diamond, 1993, p. 131). Such a pejorative view of translation is at variance with present-day translation theory, which accepts difference and hybridization as a sine qua non of translated texts.

The cross-cultural adaptation of children’s literature has recently been explored with renewed rigor by critics working on the ways in which literary works for children are culturally altered to suit different readerships in different countries. Adjusting not just the content but also the form to suit the tastes of readerships in target cultures is standard fare for adaptors from time immemorial. A broad survey of the field has been given by Reinhert Tabbert (2002), though this branch of adaptation research can also be exemplified by the work of Cay Dollerup and Ritta Oittinen. The former charts the routes of transmission of Brothers Grimm’s fairytales across Europe, with a plethora of adaptations in a host of languages (Dollerup, 1999). The latter examines adaptation as a form of translation, using a corpus of West European translations of classical fairytales (Oittinen, 2000). She moves beyond written versions, however, and draws attention to modern movie adaptations, showing the full ramifications of rewriting across space, time, and media. In her view, adaptation, as a strategy that permits great liberty, gives new life to canonical works.

Reception by the reader is a crucial factor that determines the form taken by adaptations in a great deal of children’s literature. A range of cultures have been covered in a spate of recent studies. Lan Dong discusses how one Chinese fairytale can travel to other cultures and induce a full range of adaptations, including a Disney version (Dong, 2001). Olga Papusha analyzes the two adaptations of A.A. Milne’s fairytale cycle of the Winnie the Pooh stories by a Russian (Boris Zakhoder) and a Ukrainian (Leonid Solon’ko). She concludes that both works must be understood in terms of the ‘tendency toward expansion […] of a new generation of readers’ (Papusha, n.d., para. 14) who belong to a new post-Soviet, post-totalitarian space. With regard to three Portuguese versions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Lauro Maia Amorim highlights the fact that the Brazilian adaptation by Nicholau Sevcenko is clearly targeted at eleven- and twelve-year-olds (Amorim, 2009, sec. 3), as seen in the adaptor’s choice of vocabulary and use of colloquialisms, among other things. To be precise, these readers of adaptations can be viewed as ‘addressees’ of adaptations, and they determine indirectly how the adaptors play fast and loose with the original text. Often, radical moves are undertaken in response to the anticipated readership, resulting in ‘adaptive readings’ of the original. Amorim cites examples where the adaptor intervenes into the story by assuming the presence of a storyteller (see Amorim, 2009).

The translation studies approach to adaptation

While scholars of children’s literature cannot ignore the link between adaptations and translations, it is translation theorists who have engaged intensively with the interface between these two forms, especially their interconnectedness. In the translation studies field, theorists have debated for a long...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Recent Trends in Chinese Translation Studies
• 1. A survey of the ‘new’ discipline of adaptation studies: between translation and interculturalism
• 2. Family resemblance in translation: a legacy revisited
• 3. Performing multimodality: literary translation, intersemioticity and technology
• 4. From norm-breaking to norm-making: a sociological study of the genesis of a new norm
• 5. The transformation of the translatorial identity and the shift of translation style: a comparison of the three versions of the she king translated by James Legge
• 6. Translation as adaptation and selection: a feminist case
• 7. Stance and mediation in transediting news headlines as paratexts
• 8. Translating Kung Fu Panda’s kung fu-related elements: cultural representation in dubbing and subtitling
• 9. Reframing humor in TV news translation
• 10. Investigating institutional practice in news translation: An empirical study of a Chinese agency translating discourse on China
• 11. Bibliography-based quantitative translation history
• 12. Mapping interpreting studies: The state of the field based on a database of nine major translation and interpreting journals (2000–2010)
• 13. The past, present and future of Chinese MA theses in Interpreting Studies: A scientometric survey
• 14. International visibility of mainland China Translation Studies community: A scientometric study
• 15. An empirical study of pauses in Chinese-English simultaneous interpreting
• 16. Explicitation patterns in English-Chinese consecutive interpreting: differences between professional and trainee interpreters
• 17. Sign language interpreting on Chinese TV: a survey on user perspectives
• 18. Problems and strategies in public service interpreting as perceived by a sample of Chinese-Catalan/Spanish interpreters
• Index