Translation Seminar Series

What would happen if translation theories and cultural studies talk to each other? In this talk, Dr Cynthia Tsui will reveal that "translation" can be used as a thinking method that sheds light on other disciplines. Although translation is traditionally viewed as a linguistic practice, it visualizes a reasoning model of the "in-between".

In this seminar, I will compare the concept of Translation Competence with a concept that I have called Translator Competence and which is more closely associable with (though very far from alignable with) the notion of competence which we find at play in theoretical linguistics.

Adaptation Studies have become very popular in recent years in many university departments, especially those of English Literature and Film Studies, with a growing number of books, conferences and journals in the area. This talk begins by examining the interface (or lack of interface) between Translation Studies and Adaptation Studies, also introducing the concept of appropriation, and examples will be given from adaptations and appropriations of the works of William Shakespeare, particularly Othello.

Chinese-English dictionaries typically offer as the closest English equivalents of rén 仁 “benevolent/-ce, kind/ness, humane/ness,” and Mencius’s English translators by and large stick to those translations as well. Following the lead of James Legge, for example, D. C. Lau and the translators of the Shandong Friendship Press edition meticulously translate it in almost every case as “benevolent” or “benevolence,” and most Mencius scholars writing in English, whether Chinese or non-Chinese, also translate it as “benevolent/-ce”; David Hinton uses “humane” and “humanity.”

By the nineteenth century, "culture" and "civilization" had been translated into different languages in Europe and beyond, and both came to be regarded in the West as "international" concepts. A careful study of the translation history of these two terms, however, would reveal that European internationalism was not only deeply implicated in colonialism, but also heavily fraught with nationalism inside Europe.

The foundational narrative of the life and deeds of the Buddha (c. 557- 483 BC) is the Sanskrit epic Buddhacharitam by Ashvaghosha (1st century AD). As part of the great enterprise of translating Buddhist texts from Sanskrit, this work too was translated into Chinese as Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King by Dharmaraksha (420 AD).

A key mechanism in the process of understanding a text involves the recognition and/or building of connections between the signs within the text and the systems of signs without. It can be said that because of the infinite possibilities for making such connections, a reader can interpret in myriad ways, though always within the parameters set by the text as well as by what Stanley Fish has termed the "interpretive community."

Spanning over more than forty years, Eileen Chang's Chinese-English translation (1920-1995) constitutes an extremely important part of all of her translation activities. Her Chinese-English translation began in 1952, right after she had arrived in Hong Kong as an exile from the Chinese mainland.

This is an anatomy of the process that led to five translations of Chinese poems written in traditional modes - three jueju, one wuyan lüshi, and one qiyan lüshi — by the poet Wann Ai-jen (poems and translations to appear in the November issue of Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine).

American writer Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) is a significant figure in 20th century Sino-American interaction. Buck was “mentally bifocal”. Her nearly forty-year stay in China and the second half of her life back in America, put her in a unique position in Sino-American conflict. Buck’s masterpiece, The Good Earth describes family life in Chinese village in early 20th century.