Translation of Contemporary Taiwan Literature in a Cross-Cultural Context explores the social, cultural, and linguistic implications of translation of Taiwan literature for transnational cultural exchange. It demonstrates principally how asymmetrical cultural relationships, mediation processes, and ideologies of the translation players constitute the culture-specific translation activity as a highly contested site, where translation can reconstruct and rewrite the literature and the culture it represents. Four main theoretical themes are explored in relation to such translation activity: sociological studies, cultural and rewriting studies, English as a lingua franca, and social and performative linguistics. These offer insightful perspectives on the translation as an interpretive encounter between not only two languages, two cultural systems and assumptions taking place, but also among various translation mediators. This book will be useful to scholars and students working on translation and cultural studies, China/Taiwan literature studies, and literature studies in cross-cultural contexts.

"Translation of Contemporary Taiwan Literature in a Cross-Cultural Context explores the social, cultural, and linguistic implications of translation of Taiwan literature for transnational cultural exchange. It demonstrates principally how asymmetrical cultural relationships, mediation processes, and ideologies of the translation players constitute the culture-specific translation activity as a highly contested site, where translation can reconstruct and rewrite the literature and the culture it represents. Four main theoretical themes are explored in relation to such translation activity: sociological studies, cultural and rewriting studies, English as a lingua franca, as well as social and performative linguistics. These offer insightful perspectives on the translation as an interpretive encounter between not only two languages, two cultural systems and assumptions taking place, but also among various translation mediators. This book will be useful to scholars and students working on translation and cultural studies, China/Taiwan literature studies and literature studies in cross-cultural contexts"--

Owing to Taiwan's multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers' creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the "post-truth" era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, the volume focuses on three interrelated themes – the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers' experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors' co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination.

Terminology Translation in Chinese Contexts: Theory and Practice investigates the theory and practice of terminology translation, terminology management, and scholarship within the distinctive milieu of Chinese and explores the complex relationship between terminology translation (micro level) and terminology management (macro level). This book outlines the contemporary challenges of terminology translation and terminology management within Chinese contexts in specialized fields including law, the arts, religion, Chinese medicine, and food products. The volume also examines how the development and application of new technologies such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence have brought about major changes in the language service industry. Technology such as machine translation and computer-assisted translation has spawned new challenges in terminology management practices and has facilitated their evolution in contexts of ever greater internationalization and globalization. This book recontextualizes terminology translation and terminology management with a special focus on English–Chinese translation. It is hoped that the volume will enable and enhance dialogue between Chinese and Western scholars and professionals in the field. All chapters have been written by specialists in the different subfields and have been peer-reviewed by the editors.

Translating Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’ into Chinese explores the choices in poetry translation in light of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and illustrates the ways in which readers can achieve a deeper understanding of translated works in English and Chinese. Focusing on Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’, a collection of elegant and philosophical poems, as a source text, Ma and Wang analyse four Chinese target texts by Zheng Zhenduo, Yao Hua, Lu Jinde and Feng Tang and consider their linguistic complexities through SFL. This book analyses the source text and the target texts from the perspectives of the four strata of language, including graphology, phonology, lexicogrammar and context. Ideal for researchers and academics of SFL, Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis, Translating Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’ into Chinese provides an in-depth exploration of SFL and its emerging prominence in the field of Translation Studies.

In Mapping the Translator: A Study of Liang Shiqiu, the writer studies Liang Shiqiu (1903–1987), who was not only a famous writer and important critic but also one of the most prominent translators in China in the 20th century, most notably the first Chinese to finish a translation of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Based on primary sources, this research covers issues related to the historical, cultural, cognitive and sociological dimensions of translator studies. It investigates Liang’s translation poetics; the influences of possible patrons and professionals on him; the relationship between Liang’s ideology, the dominant ideology and his translation; Liang’s debates with Lu Xun about and beyond translation criteria, and whether there is inconsistency or possible contradiction in Liang’s translation poetics. This book also analyses the similarities and differences between Liang Shiqiu and Wu Mi–two followers of Irving Babbitt–in terms of translation poetics, and further explores the reasons leading to such differences. This book is targeted at scholars and students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, in the fields of translation studies, Asian studies, Chinese studies, and literary studies.

A Deaf Take on Non-Equivalence in Written Chinese Translation examines the issue of lexical non-equivalence between written Chinese and Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) translation, describing its theoretical and practical implications. This research foregrounds the semiotic resources in the Deaf community of Hong Kong by analyzing translation strategies exhibited by Deaf Hongkongers when they were invited to translate written Chinese passages with specialized and culturally specific concepts in a monologic setting. With discourse analysis as a framework, the major findings of this research were that: (1) a taxonomy of strategies featured depiction, manual representations of Chinese characters and visual metonymy, writing and mouthing; (2) employment of multisemiotic and multimodal resources gave intended viewers access to different facets of meaning; and (3) repeated renditions of the same concepts gave rise to condensed, abbreviated occasionalisms. Observations from this research serve as a point of reference for interpreting scholars, practitioners and students as well as policymakers who formulate interpretation service provision and assessment.