Translation Seminar Series (Since 2001)

Most stage performances of translated theatre “speak in” translation, as they inhabit the world of foreign plays and adopt it as a model for the people and the theatre. Other performances “speak over” translation, as they interpolate the ideas of the local people into the foreign plays, not only in Sinified adaptations but also in supposedly faithful translations.

The internet is a new global space where exchanges take place on several topics and in many languages. Certain platforms provide opportunities for research in the shape of semi-organized data on literary and social contexts and access to possible far-located research populations.

本文通過分析《蒙古秘史》的內容特點、文本形式、版本流傳、語言特徵、翻譯歷史等要素，探討了這部蒙古族典籍的翻譯學價值，並提出宏觀譯學和微觀譯學概念，指出只有充分認識其譯學價值，才能使民族典籍的翻譯研究更加全面。

Since the late 1990s there has been an increasing interest in the representation of Balkan culture in the literary works of authors writing in English. Scholars (Bakić-Hayden 1995, Todorova 1997, Goldsworthy 1998, Norris 1999, Hammond 2010) have shown how literary representations of the Balkans have reflected and reinforced its stereotypical construction as Europe’s “dark and untamed Other”.

The seminar will focus on how the performance of popular music, as well as its reception, can be influenced and shaped by translation and other interlingual activities. It will first offer an overview of the phenomenon by discussing music’s various forms of materiality and the accompanying forms of translation.

This seminar will report on a large, interdisciplinary research project based at the University of Manchester in the UK and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project involves compiling large electronic corpora of ancient Greek, medieval Arabic, early Latin and Modern English to examine how central concepts in the humanities and sciences have been (re)translated into these three lingua francas, and how they have been interpreted and reinterpreted as they entered new cultural and temporal spaces.

Chinese women’s appearance on the scene of literary translation has been a long-acknowledged fact. The earliest written record of Chinese women’s translation can be traced back to 1898, and the first woman’s translation of western literature is Xue Shaowei’s (1900) rendition of the French writer Jules Gabriel Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in 80 Days), though via its Japanese version.

文化自信與文化自覺相輔相成，但文化自覺過去沒有得到足夠的重視。 要提升國家形象需要有高度的文化自覺，文化自信只有建立在文化自覺之上才是可靠的。就翻譯而言，文化自覺的最終目的就是要在不損害中國文化精神的前提下，以最合適的方式來解讀和翻譯最合適的典籍材料，從而達到消解分歧，促進中外文化的交流，極大地滿足西方受眾閱讀中國典籍的需要。

Interpreting has become a visible and attractive profession in some parts of the world, but many people know little about what it involves in its various branches above and beyond a good mastery of the working languages. Far from being ‘language converting devices’, interpreters constantly analyze incoming (source language) speeches and make decisions on what and how to formulate their target-language speeches.

Eighty four translations of modern and contemporary Chinese literature were published in Spain between 1949 and 2010. The history of this under researched corpus of translations and their reception will form the basis of the discussion in this seminar. I will try to demonstrate two interrelated arguments: the marginality of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in Spain and the mediation of the Anglophone and Francophone literary systems in the Spanish reception.

During Japan’s self-imposed isolation (1639-1859), Nagasaki was the country’s only port open for international trade: merchants from two nations, Holland and China, were granted access. While in Nagasaki, the Dutch and Chinese were each confined to their own tightly controlled districts: on Dejima Island 出島 (from 1639) and in Tōjin yashiki 唐人屋敷 (Chinese Quarter, from 1689) respectively.

Is translation indispensable or expendable? Is it a necessary evil and a constant reminder of our limitations or rather a powerful way of enlarging our understanding and experience? Is translation always benign, beneficial and positive or can it turn into a sinister, malign and ethically dubious activity?

Charges of Eurocentrism have been troubling the TS scholarly community lately, leading recently to a prominent countercharge in the pages of Translation Studies from Andrew Chesterman, who argues that science is always universalist, and that cultural relativists who accuse scholars like him of Eurocentrism are therefore simply wrong.

In the light of current translation studies scholarship, Southeast Asia is largely underresearched compared to other parts of Asia. Translation traditions in a region so diverse in politics, geographies and cultures such as this cannot easily be accommodated by established notions of literal vs free, domestication vs foreignisation, or the post-colonial pattern of appropriation, resistance and hybridity.

Joan Riviere’s article “Womanliness as a Masquerade” will form the basis of a discussion of the late Qing intellectual and noted translator Ku Hung-ming. Specifically, this paper will argue that, just as some women can be seen as performing ‘womanliness’ as a masquerade, so too we may theorize the translations of Gu Hongming as a type of masquerade, a conscious adopting of a role that draws on pre-existing norms relating to that role.

Hong Kong film maker Evans Chan lives between Hong Kong and New York, making films and writing about Hong Kong to an international audience and reader. The inter-lingual, intercultural and inter-medial conditions face by both Evans Chan and Pema Tzeden are representative of contemporary creativity.

誠如西方學者所言，儘管當今的描寫翻譯學研究已經取得長足的進展，然而由於戲劇翻譯問題之複雜，並且缺少令人滿意的解釋性理論，迄今就其展開深入研究的甚少。此種情形同樣適用於當今中國的戲劇翻譯界。當代西方翻譯理論家蘇珊•巴斯奈特曾反覆強調，文本功能是翻譯的中心問題。落實到戲劇翻譯領域更是如此。巴斯奈特尤其重視戲劇文本的可表演性(performativity)、可言說性(speakability)和讀者/觀眾的接受問題。

Translation is one of the core practices through which any cultural group constructs representations of another and contests representations of the self. Part of its power stems from the fact that as a genre, it tends to be understood as “merely” reporting on something that is already available in another social space, that something being an independent source text that pre-exists the translation.

《法句經》於三國時期由著名譯經家支謙譯成中文，由支謙所撰的《法句經序》，更是中國現存最早論及翻譯理論的文章，其翻譯風格對後世的佛經翻譯不無影響，因此，此序對中國譯學研究別具意義。講者先作文獻考索，試圖探索博極群書、晚年專精佛學與佛經翻譯的梁啟超，為何無視《法句經序》？講者繼而嘗試探討《法句經序》的文本價值 ── 支謙既無意為學，此序怎成中國譯學開山之作？

This seminar will begin with a few minutes of live Tai Chi demonstration to the accompaniment of a strain of non-Chinese music, to illustrate how the flow of energy enables a ‘stigmergy’ among the faculties of a human body, both physical and spiritual, to bring about a kinaesthetic experience of articulation in a yin-yang response to the rhythm of the music.

How do text, translation and technology intersect and interact in contemporary poetics? This project attempts an answer to this question through a case study of the avant-garde Taiwanese poet Chen Li (b.1954). In Chen’s oeuvre, translation as a concept is instantiated in a number of different ways: as translingual signification where different languages encounter within a text; as the displacement of a printed book by its electronic version (media translation); and as the creative transposition (intersemiotic translation) of a poem into a musical performance complete with vocals and piano accompaniment.

Socio-cultural context is an important aspect in the study of language and translation, because the three, namely, context, language and translation are inextricably linked. This paper attempts to discuss the translation of different text types which are functioning in the social contexts of Macao and other areas of China.

English-language and German-language cultures both claim the same shared classical Greek tradition. Even though knowledge of classical Greek is hardly wide spread, the Iliad and Odyssey are familiar to a wide audience through translations and other rewritings across different genres and media, from fiction to non-fiction, prose and poetry to film, stage, and the internet.

傳統翻譯研究主要集中在技術層面，強調與實踐的關係；這一點在中國尤其顯著。其中譯名問題的研究最為突出。本研討會試討論中國譯名方法的原則，並總結機構為統一科學譯名做出的努力。

The Chuci 楚辭 (Songs of the South or Incantations of Chu) is one of the two oldest and most influential anthologies of Chinese poetry. Its poems depict the enduring tension of loyalty and dissent for the scholar-official of traditional China. The anthology is also notable for its regional elements, representing the culture of the ancient state of Chu (centered in the area of modern Hubei and Hunan provinces).

This talk examines the translator-author relationship against the backdrop of governmental and non-governmental (publishing, editorial, and the translator’s own) censorship in present-day China. I distinguish three types of translator-author relationship affected by censorship and/or self-censorship, resulting in three categories of translations, i.e. full translations, partial translations and non-translations.

Belated interest in the aesthetics of the event (variously from Badiou) has brought renewed attention to the performative nature of translation. Part of this might be attached to the technologies that now favour groups of volunteer translators, who are at once the producers and consumers of translations (hence “prosumers”).

Schleiermacher’s German translation of Plato’s philosophical dialogues, the first five volumes of which appeared between 1805 and 1809, has received little attention from students of translation. Yet it embodies Schleiermacher’s understanding of Plato, which he further elaborated in the introductions he wrote to each of the dialogues and in his general introduction to Plato’s work as a whole.

What constitutes the relationship between world literature and Chineseness? How has translation shaped Chinese poetry, and can translation be understood as at the foundation not only of world literature, but of Chineseness, as well? This talk will begin to answer these questions by demonstrating how Chineseness as an aspect of the Chinese poetic tradition is itself a result of translation.

Those with an interest in Ainu oral narratives will soon come across the name of Mashiho Chiri (1909 – 1961), who today would be called a ‘native anthropologist’. Mashiho’s translation style is strongly influenced by the work of his well-known sister, Yukie Chiri (1903 – 1922). Regrettably, most translations of Mashiho appeared only with the Japanese text.

The first non-European and Asian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore; he is still the only Indian to win the prize and one of under half a dozen writers from Asia. Though the prize is awarded not for a single book but for a body of work, Tagore won it apparently for just one slim book of poems published in his own English translation under the non-translated title Gitanjali (A Handful of Offerings of Songs; 1912).

翻譯文化史重在探討翻譯對於文化（尤其是譯入語文化）的意義和影響，翻譯在文化史上的作用，以及文化對翻譯的制約。翻譯的過程也是一個文化感受的過程，它不同程度地包含著理解、比較、選擇、融會和創新，從中可以對翻譯的原因和意義獲得更充分的理解。
不同於一般翻譯史的是，翻譯文化史注重對種種翻譯現象、事件作文化傳播意義上的分析與解釋，而不僅僅是翻譯史實的敍述和鈎沉；即不僅僅是描述性的，還應是解釋性的。

A notion that has long dominated our understanding of the role of translation in (literary) modernization comes from postcolonial theories that emphasize the agency of the translational space (i.e. the third space) in the process of “importing” ideas. The descriptive and analytic limits of post-colonial thoughts are due to their reliance on colonial institutions (e.g. languages, literatures, universities, etc.) which are/were immediately available and advantageous to them.

Teaching translation in a research-informed instead of an impressionistic manner to ensure the pedagogical quality of translator training is, ceteris paribus, dependent on the extent to which the formulation of a text, be it a source or a target text, can be perceived and explained as accountable for its function and effect. This presentation will focus on an on-line platform (the Platform) specifically designed for an accountability-driven mode of teaching and (self-)learning for translation and bilingual writing, which is currently under construction at the City University of Hong Kong.

This lecture focuses on fundamental and fast GLOBAL(izing) changes;
In fact most academic guest lectures are an illustration of mobility (in – scholarly – communication). (Cf. Ong 1982.)
In the present case: (a) intercontinental contacts/exchanges (are in fast progress); (b) the focus is on (global and other) Communication

There is a growing tendency in contemporary art to explore the bonds and interconnections between text and image. The plethora of possible relations between the textual and the visual, across a variety of contemporary art practices, creates a vast geography of image as language and language as image, from typography to language-based art practices.

There exists mutual acceptance and interaction between American Redology and the two English versions of Hong Lou Meng. Obviously, the translations influence American Redology and are also being influenced by American Redology. The translation serves to enhancing reputation and foreign understanding of the original text, hence making it not only a part of Redology, but also a key element in promoting the Redology and enriching the original.

“Culture—Interculture—Intraculture” identifies three stages of cultural identity: cultural: where the foreign is clearly marked, as in Euripides’s Medea, the book of Ruth in the Bible, Shakespeare’s Henry V; intercultural: where the foreign is absorbed in the native, as in the Pole Joseph Conrad, the Czech Tom Stoppard, and the Japanese Kazuo Ishiguro in Great Britain, the Pole Czelaw Milosz, the Russians Vladimir Nabokov and Josef Brodsky in the United States; and the Romanians Paul Celan, E. M. Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, the Irishman Samuel Beckett, and the Chinese François Cheng in France.

Shifts in translation have been extensively visited and revisited. Many different taxonomies exist that intend to list most decisions taken or choices made by translators, be these decisions called shifts, techniques, procedures or strategies. The problem is that there’s no explicit distinction between compulsory and deliberate interventions.

Jiang Rong’s semi-autographical novel Lang Tu Teng (《狼圖騰》, first published in 2004) has been a huge literary triumph (winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007) and an unprecedented cultural phenomenon in Mainland China, breaking all-time sales records as the second most read book after Chairman Mao’s little red book. Howard Goldblatt’s lucid translation of Wolf Totem (2008) has also made the novel into an exciting popular work of narrative fiction for the international community of literary readers and cultural critics.

This seminar will explore the ways in which the city has become an object of translation studies – by investigating some of the recent advances in translation theory that expand the field. Work to be discussed, among others, are books by Michael Cronin, Doris Sommer, Emily Apter, Maria Tymoczko, Edwin Gentzler, Vicente Rafael.

In the study and discussion of translation, the reader has not gone unnoticed, and deservedly is becoming more important to translatologists. Readers of translations span a spectrum, from those who do not speak any foreign language, and urgently need a translation for instrumental purposes, such as a manual, to those who, in spite of their proficiency in the target language, choose to read a translation in order to exercise their powers of critical analysis.

Translation history, specializing in translation phenomena through history, has earned a niche in the hall of Klio, the mythical Muse of history. The knowledge system of translation history prepares for its research system as an inter-disciplinary subject. Then what is translation history? And what is its relationship with both history and translation studies?

The first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China (1949-1966) was a critical period for the newly-born modern Chinese nation to gain recognition in the international world. The same period also witnessed a unique translation activity, i.e. source culture-generated translation of a large number of classical and modern/contemporary Chinese literature into English and other foreign languages mainly undertaken by teams of Chinese and foreign translators in the Foreign Languages Press (FLP) in Beijing, a state-sponsored institute, in an attempt to reshape the image of China, hence rendering legitimacy to the newly-born nation.

The creation, translation and publication of love letters boomed in the1920s-1930s, a period of the Republican Era of China. Quite a few renowned writers or the young keen to be literarily known were then in an effort to publish their love letters or novels written in letter format, or to render the love letters of famous persons.

The translation of the Bible into Greek before Christianity took shape is well-known, but the translated nature of ancient Greek literature as a whole before Christianity emerged has not yet been fully explored. The present paper argues that ancient Greek literature was heavily indebted to West Asia.

This presentation will focus on the significance of translation of theory for the self-fashioning of a type of identity of the Japanese intellectual. After briefly outlining the significance of translation for Japanese modernity, the work of several translators of theory will be discussed.

In the past two decades there has been a tendency to politicize translation studies and other disciplines in the humanities, alleging that the dominance of theories originating from the West is the result of power differentials instead of academic merits. Scholars of periphery origin who embrace central theories and values are accused of “self-colonization”.

While a rhetorical perspective on translation has started to attract scholarly attention, translation’s impact on the disciplinary development of rhetoric remains unexplored by practitioners in the fields concerned. Even a cursory look into rhetoric’s long history, however, would turn up much evidence of translation’s crucial role in shaping up the conceptual and institutional contours of the art of persuasion.

Subtitles do not simply transcribe the dialogues of a film. Subtitles involve specific groups of audience and seek to enhance their viewing experience. Based on this function of subtitling, I examine the Chinese/Cantonese subtitles provided in the DVDs of two films: The Brothers Grimm (2005) and Shrek 2 (2004).