Abstract

The aim of this essay is to examine how the study of world literature has decisively moved into a new postcolonial direction with the latest investigation of the unnamed Chinese novel on which Goethe formulates his much-quoted world literary imagination. He conceptualizes world literature as a subversive and aspirational imaginary in opposition to the increasingly dominant Hegelian world vision, on the one hand posing itself as an aesthetic cosmopolitanism opposed to French national politics, on the other hand destabilizing the calcifying Eurocentric hierarchy of cultures, languages, literatures, nations, and religions in the 1820s. This world literary imagination is inseparable from the long history of Orientalism, but its newness comes with a pioneering philological representation of China by French Orientalist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. I illustrate how a hybrid digital methodology in the intersection of German, translation, and postcolonial studies reveals the missing link between Orientalism, Goethe’s notion of world literature, and the Chinese novel.

Abstract

This essay discusses the Amadis in Translation digital project (http://amadis.newtfire.org), which applies TEI XML encoding to Robert Southey’s 1806 translation Amadis of Gaul, comparing it to Southey’s source, the 1547 Sevilla edition of Garci Rodríquez de Montalvo’s Amadís de Gaula. The project uses computational methods to align the source at the clause level rather than word-by-word, reflecting the radical compressions and changes Southey made to the source. The essay uses the alignment tables generated by the project to assess Southey’s use of emotion in a set of sample chapters. Contrary to what the aesthetics of the Romantic era might have led us to believe, the data show that Southey dampened the use of emotion in the source text, potentially for reasons of taste or national and cultural identity. Our digital project illustrates how computational analysis of translations can revise commonsense predictions about texts and make comparisons between translations precise and quantifiable.

Abstract

This article offers a digital visualization of textual relations of translation of the first four volumes of New Youth, a leading journal in early twentieth-century China. Translation in New Youth has long been considered as a pivotal medium for the importation of modern Western literature and scholarship. This assumption, however plausible, is generally based on selected texts in the journal that were complete or abridged renditions of Western canonical writings. For a more comprehensive view of translation in New Youth, this article expands the scope of study to include various types of “unmarked” translations, such as in-text notes and citations that were renditions of segments and fragments of foreign texts. To gauge the diverse translations in their immediate context, the study records the translations, their sources, and the items published in proximity to them, then processes the textual relations into a network graph using the data visualization tool Gephi. The structured storage of data in the text map allows translations to be contextualized in various text milieu; it also enables a macroscopic view of the sources of knowledge of the journal in this period, which reveals signs of randomness and rupture in the journal’s selection of materials for translation. The observation challenges existing scholarship that depicts New Youth translation as a consistent, strategic practice that foregrounded Chinese literary modernity.

This work was supported by Research Grants Committee (Project number 24606617).

Abstract

A word-cloud is a visual representation of text data in which the importance of each word is shown with different point size or color. Word-cloud generators rearrange the content of a given text in free form, emphasizing its most recurring lexical elements, thus promoting an immediate understanding of the text’s main focal points. This tool proves particularly useful when applied to the study of translations: when building upon relatively large numbers of short texts (such as the different renditions of a single piece of poetry), word-clouds can highlight translation idiosyncrasies, reveal convergences and divergences in interpretation, and point back at potentially problematic junctures in the source text. Furthermore, word-clouds can also be considered as texts in themselves, or “meta-translations”: by disrupting the syntactic construction of a text and rearranging its content according to criteria of identity and repetition, word-clouds promote complementary ways of reading that break away from the linearity of writing. Overall, word-clouds provide a useful tool for the reverse-engineering of a source text’s problematics from the raw material given in the translated text. Using Li Shangyin’s poem “Luohua” 落花 (Falling Flowers) and its different English translations as case study, this paper discusses the utility of word-clouds for implementing what Theo Hermans, building upon Appiah’s reflections, advocated as the critical practice of “thick translation.”

Abstract

While there are an increasing number of electronic databases that contain large corpora potentially useful to researchers in translation studies, they come in a bewildering variety of size, coverage, reliability, and accessibility. For these and other reasons, researchers in translation studies have been slow to make use of such databases, despite the fact that corpus-based translation studies are now well established. This article seeks to explore a set of three interlocking questions regarding the usefulness of large, preexisting online corpora for research in translation studies. First, how useful are such databases for full-text searches and the compilation of corpora? Second, to what extent are privately compiled corpora now reinventing the wheel? Finally, what are the costs and benefits of using online databases versus privately compiled corpora? Through the use of a pilot study, this investigation seeks to make researchers aware of some of the major structural issues involved while working with large online databases. In particular, it is demonstrated that the purpose for which such databases were built means that, when adapting them for use in translation studies, considerable care must be taken to ensure that the researcher is aware of a wide variety of factors influencing the structure, accuracy, and usefulness of the material.

Abstract

Corpus-based translation studies have increasingly attracted attention in recent years. Translated literature of the late Qing and Republican Era in China is one popular topic of research in translation studies. Building up a corpus of translated literature from this period may provide a stronger empirical basis for investigation. This article introduces online resources, including a variety of databases and tools, with a focus on the Chinese OCR software used in corpus compilation. Features of databases that contain translated literary texts of late Qing and Republican Period are compared, problems of OCR recognition for these texts are identified, and four OCR software packages are tested using sample texts. This article provides insights into large-scale digitization projects on Chinese texts as well.