Abstract:
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. In these cases of virtual movement between languages and/or media, translating as a textual event (translation proper) sometimes takes place, where semantic content is transported from source to target language. Chen Li’s experimentation with translation and technology thus produces discursive sites where translation takes place at various levels: within the translingual text, between media platforms, between languages and between semiotic modes of literary communication.
About the Speaker:
Lee Tong King is currently an assistant professor in translation at the University of Hong Kong, and a NAATI-accredited professional translator. Currently the associate executive editor of Translation Quarterly, he has research interests in culture and ideology in translation, intersemiotic translation, and postmodernist poetics. He is co-author of Translating Chinese Drama (in Chinese) and author of Translating the Multilingual City: Cross-lingual Practices and Language Ideology.