Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 207 DOI:10.1177/0021989412440433. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/2/20

Translation students' use of dictionaries: a Hong Kong case study for Chinese to English translation

The use of the dictionary and translation are both common language experiences. The dictionary is an indispensable tool to translating. Yet dictionary skills are grossly neglected in translator training, which assumes that students have acquired all the necessary knowledge and skills before training. In order to reveal the situation in Hong Kong, this case study attempts to investigate the dictionary use pattern of 1 07 translation students from five local universities for Chinese to English translation, and the dictionary consultation process of four respondents. Triangulation methods were employed: questionnaire survey, interview, think-aloud protocol, and performance exercise. A coding system for think-aloud protocols has be~ adopted from Thumb (2004), with modifications for Chinese-English dictionary use for production. Results found that most of the respondents had not been trained to use the Chinese-English dictionary, and that they had difficulties in using it for Chinese to English translation. Curricular assessment discovered a gap between student needs in dictionary skills and the curriculum. Pedagogical recommendations are made, and the notion of Dictionary Use Competence is proposed for translation students, while dictionary skills should be treated as a ·Iearning strategy across the curriculum from the primary to university levels. The study contributes to the teaching and learning of dictionary skills, with special relevance to Chinese-English translation, and to the research on dictionary use for production in terms of the language combination of Chinese/English, and to the method of introspection

The politics and practice of trans-culturation: importing and translating Chinese autobiographical writings into the British Literary Field

This study examines the social, cultural and institutional factors and circumstances surrounding the process of importing and translating six Chinese autobiographical writings in the British context. In parallel, it conducts a critical reading of the press reviews of these six books to map out and discuss the representations of Chinese culture and society as outcomes of the translation process (with the translation process understood in the broad sense to include the selection of the source text for translation as well as the actual translating activities). The investment in Chinese autobiographies set in 'Red China' and their uptake by the UK readership have become a prominent phenomenon over the last two decades or so. This phenomenon poses several questions around the criteria on the basis of which this specific genre has been selected and imported into the British literary market and the way it is translated. In this study I use a sociologically-orientated methodological and theoretical framework that takes into account the socio-cultural contexts of translation which then features as an instance of social reproduction. In addition to the press reviews, this study uses as primary data the accounts, views and experiences of the people who have been involved in the translation process, including the literary agent and the publishers who have not received enough attention in the recent sociologically-orientated approach despite their decisive role with regard to many aspects of the translation process. My research thus examines translation from the perspectives of social agents and their interactive relationships within institutional contexts that shape the agents' activities. Based on semi-structured interviews with the participants who were involved in the translation process of the six autobiographies, this study focuses, firstly, on the selection and importing of six Chinese auto/biographical writings for translation and the role of the social agents involved, with particular attention given to the literary agent. Selecting and importing the originals are seen as a formative stage in translation, involving the actions of a range of social agents situated within different yet overlapping institutional contexts: namely, literary agents, publishers, translators and authors. Secondly, this study focuses on the actual translating process, considered in the light of its interplay with the evaluation of the 'good' translation and the editing process, to examine the extent to which the social and professional interactions and negotiations between translators and other social agents - writers, literary agents and editors - affect the way translators translate. Then, based on a critical textual analysis of the press reviews of the six translated Chinese auto/biographical wrings that appeared in the UK daily newspapers, this study examines how the reviewers represent and frame the truth-value and witness voices through the translated self-writings, and how these reviews anticipate and mediate the readers' perceptions of Communist Chinese history and society. My findings suggest that the power relations underpinning the struggles, competitions, negotiations and collaborations within the publishing and literary fields shape the translation process where literary agents, publishers/editors, translators and authors interact and negotiate to yield the final product for the British book market. The selection process is shown to be a decisive step in the process of translation, which to a great extent shapes the way the Chinese autobiographies have been translated and received. Translation, thus, plays a significant role in anticipating, (re)constructing and reshaping the (existing) representations of Contemporary Chinese culture and society

The use of interpreters and translators by professionals : report on a day seminar held at Mount Lawley College on 18th August 1981

Some professions are, by their very nature, unobtrusive. We are dependent, for example, from time to time, on the professional competence of air traffic controllers, though, unless things go wrong, we are not likely to notice what they are doing for us. They are not in our focus, but they serve to facilitate what is in focus for us. Translators and interpreters are like that. They are at their most successful when they are least obvious. Their professional role is to facilitate communication rather than to participate in it. Their exceptional communicational skills are put to the service of their clients, and their reward comes not from having these skills recognized, but from seeing them function to bring the linguistically-estranged together

Resistance through Transformation? The Meanings of Gender Reversals in a Taiwanese Buddhist Monastery

This chapter demonstrates that Taiwanese Buddhist nuns resist the limitations of traditional Han gender ideologies by drawing on opportunities offered within those traditional gender constructions—opportunities that allow them to define themselves in opposition to the limited female gender characteristics and roles they reject. Crane argues that we should not interpret these nuns\u27 masculine identification simply as resisting dominant Han gender ideologies. Instead, the nuns embrace the traditional, sexist Han ideologies, even to the point of exaggeration—portraying women not only as dangerous to the spiritual cultivation of others, but also of limited spiritual ability. They define the negative characteristics of women as stemming from the roles that they have within the family, and having freed themselves of these familial roles in order to become nuns, define themselves as quite different from women who exhibit these negative characteristics. As these nuns are informed by other aspects of traditional Han gender cosmology, particularly by their conceptualization of genders as correlative rather than binary, changing gender is relatively easy for them. In analyzing the nuns\u27 statements about their gender change as well as their repeated references to religious, historical and mythical figures who change from women to men and serve as role models for the nuns, Crane draws on the works of historians, philosophers, and anthropologists to show that in the correlative model, genders are fluid and defined by the embodiment of the yin and yang analogy. A female in a yang position becomes, for all intents and purposes, a man. In this way, the nuns are able to imagine themselves as men in every way that is spiritually important and reject the female constraints they perceive as hingering their religious progress. This correlative gender model provides the possibility for a woman to imagine herself to be a man, provided she adheres to certain rules and has certain statuses. In this model, gender is related (but not affixed) to the sex of one\u27s body and is more accurately thought of as a product of one\u27s relationships than as a description of what one truly is

Seven hundred million to one: Personal action in reversing language shift

The paper considers what influence a single person can have on language survival and transmission of knowledge, comparing and contrasting the situation of large languages such as Putonghua (traditionally called Mandarin Chinese, with 700 million speakers) and small languages such as Eyak with as few speakers as one. It examines the delights and dilemmas of such work, the practical results (such as texts and documents) and the spiritual rewards (mostly satisfaction), drawing examples from our own work of the last 35 years with Tlingit, and from the work of colleagues, especially Michael Krauss, in the context of a volume celebrating his 70th birthday and 45 years of work on behalf of Alaska Native languages and endangered indigenous languages around the world, especially in the circumpolar north. The paper is by design an informal and non-technical address to the general reader, especially members of communities whose indigenous languages are endangered.L’article considère l’influence qu’une personne peut avoir sur une langue qui lutte pour sa survie linguistique et sur la transmission de cette langue, en comparant et contrastant la situation des langues répandues, telles que le putonghua (plus traditionnellement appellé le chinois mandarin, avec 700 millions de locuteurs) et des langues peu répandues, telles que la langue eyak que seulement une personne parle. L’article examine les joies et les dilemmes qu'apportent de tels travaux, les résultats pratiques (i.e. textes et documents) et les récompenses spirituelles (principalement des satisfactions) tirés d’exemples de nos propres travaux des dernières 35 années à étudier la langue tlingit, et des travaux de nos collègues, spécialement Michael Krauss, dans le contexte d’un volume célébrant son 70e anniversaire et aussi ses 45 ans de travaux au nom des différentes langues des Autochtones de l’Alaska et des langues indigènes en voie de disparition autour du monde, spécialement autour du cercle polaire de l’hémisphère nord. L’article a un but non-formel et non-technique et s’adresse à tous les lecteurs, spécialement aux membres des communautés dont les langues indigènes sont en voie de disparition