Translating Chinese Literature and Culture for Contemporary English Readers: Meaning, Imagology, and Context

TAN Zaixi

Hong Kong Baptist University

Page 006-022

Abstract: Under the country’s initiative to make Chinese literature and culture “go international,” the translation of Chinese texts into English and other foreign languages, including texts in the various fields of literature, culture, and academia, has been developing rapidly with government funding support. Its study has in recent years also become a focal point, which seems a fitting response in TS research in China to the problems and interferences brought about by factors in the political and economic world at large. This paper offers a discussion of some of the major issues involving how to handle Chinese mother-tongue to English-language translating. These include issues on the linguistic and cultural politics of interlingual/cross-cultural communication (“inbound” vs. “outbound” translation), the intrinsic relations between outbound translation and national (self) imagology, and the dynamics of institutional outbound translation in the Chinese context. Hopefully, insights from the study may help promote development of outbound translation, as well as research into such translation, by native Chinese scholars of their mother-tongue texts into English or other foreign languages.

Keywords: translator’s mother-tongue texts, foreign reception, cultural politics, image reconstruction, institutional translation, Chinese context

DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202601002

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