The Danger of Foreignization: Ling Shuhua’s Ancient Melodies

Lawrence Venuti’s foreignization theory, with its link of translation strategy with power struggle, is one of the most influential theories in translation studies since the 1990s. At the same time, his theory has also been subject to heated debate due to its loosely defined terms, prescriptive approach, binary thinking, elitist tendency, and other issues. One issue stands out in particular: contrary to its goal of resistance against Anglo- American hegemony, foreignization can lead to its opposite—exoticism or Orientalism—under certain circumstances. In this paper, I examine the validity and application of Venuti’s foregnization theory in Ling Shuhua’s English autobiographical work Ancient Melodies. In Ling’s creative writing that embodies several forms of translation, foreignization is the dominant writing and translating strategy. By analysis, I argue that while Ling unwittingly breaks several binaries in translation studies, she deliberately creates the foreignizing effect with her careful maneuver of domestication. Ling’s highlighting of foreignizing strategy reveals her binary thinking, which displays deep roots in the power hierarchy of the West. In this way, it can be seen that foreignization strategy functions as a double-edged sword; in its open resistance against power, it is also deeply involved with and assists the power structure

Imitation and creation: Bing Xin’s Fanxing (A Maze of Stars) 繁星and Chunshui (Spring Water) 春水

Fanxing (A Maze of Stars) and Chunshui (Spring Water) are two poetry collections of modern Chinese woman writer Bing Xin (1900–1999). Because they stand at the beginning of a new genre, xiaoshi (short poetry), and are commonly regarded as representative works of this genre, people use the epithets “Bing Xin style,” “Fanxing style,” or “Chunshui style” to refer to xiaoshi writing. Nevertheless, viewed from their intimate relationship with Rabindranath Tagore’s Stray Birds, I argue that Fanxing and Chunshui are products of both imitation and creation. Imitation is not plagiarism. Dryden defines imitation as a form of translation, which allows the full play of the translator’s freedom and personality. With writing as translation, Bing Xin creates her poetics of short poetry writing based on her imitation and appropriation of Tagore’s Stray Birds. Imitation provides the authority and inspiration as well as a model for Bing Xin to follow. However, she does not imitate slavishly or translate faithfully in a traditional sense. Rather, while taking influence from Tagore, Bing Xin reverses the patriarchal and Orientalist tendencies of Tagore with her feminist and realistic writing style. In this way, she both aligns herself with the May Fourth writers and also demonstrates her own voice and features. 摘要 中国现代女作家冰心的《繁星》与《春水》被认为是中国小诗运动的起点。但是，如果把它们放在世界文学的角度去看的话，就能既看出冰心的“模仿”，也能看出她的创作。模仿，从翻译的角度来看，不是一个贬义词，德莱顿最初就把模仿定义为翻译的一种。虽然受传统忠实的翻译思想影响，他不认为模仿是一种好的翻译策略和方法，但是他认为模仿是最能发挥译者自由和个性的一种方式。西塞罗就是这种翻译方法的实践者。在五四运动的狂飙中，冰心以写为译，创造性地模仿了泰戈尔的《飞鸟集》。首先，模仿让她获得了灵感，提供了对于像小诗这样一种崭新的诗歌形式的模版，同时也保证了权威的肯定和鼓励，但是，她没有局限于仅仅是借鉴，引用，或者是传统意义上的翻译传递，而是在他的影响之下，在反射他的风格和味道的同时，写出了她自己的风格，意义和主题。这样，她在一定意义上继承了他，更重要的是反转了他。她抛弃了他的男权和东方主义倾向，写出了她自己的女性主义和中国特色， 特别是她自己的声音

From Larva to Butterfly: Sophia in Ding Ling’s Miss Sophia’s Diary and Coco in Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby

Sophia and Coco are two characters in Ding Ling\u27s Miss Sophia\u27s Diary (1928/1995) and Wei Hui\u27s Shanghai Baby (1999), respectively. Like a larva, Sophia, who enters society in the early twentieth century, is weak and immobile. Coco, who lives at the end of the twentieth century, is like a butterfly leading an outlandish lifestyle. The differences between Sophia and Coco reflect the achievement of official feminism, which liberated Chinese women from traditional patriarchal control in the social sense. However, gender issues for women remain unresolved. To fight against traditional patriarchy and especially challenge gender oppression in official feminism, both Sophia and Coco boldly acknowledge and pursue sexual desire. Their feminist discourses are both commendable and controversial, given their situations and the times in which they live

A Metonymic Translation: Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle

The Caucasian Chalk Circle is one of the most important works of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). It is also one of the most widely performed modern plays in the West. However, this critically acclaimed play is not purely Brecht’s “originality” but is indebted to an ancient Chinese play, Li Xingdao’s Hui Lan Ji (The Story of the Circle of Chalk).1 Brecht acknowledged his adaptation in the prologue of The Caucasian Chalk Circle in the voice of the singer: “It is called ‘The Chalk Circle’ and comes from the Chinese. But we’ll do it, of course, in a changed version” (Brecht 1983, 126). The “changed version” Brecht made was for the Broadway stage during his exile in America. Inevitably, he also took influences from American culture and society. Thus, in the creation of the play Brecht had two systems, Chinese and American, as his source and target systems to respond to. In addition, Brecht was not a native speaker in either of the systems; rather, he approached both primarily in German. Therefore, in both the actual and metaphorical senses, Brecht acted as a translator in his writing of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Writing was his way of translating

A Palimpsestuous Writing: Maxine Hong Kingston\u27s The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is one of the most successful Asian American literary works. Rather than reading the book as an autobiography of an Asian American girl growing up in Chinatown in America, I view it as a multifarious telling and writing of the stories of Asian American women in their interrelated relationships living in both the past and present in their hyphenated lives between China and America. With her palimpsestuous writing strategy, Kingston reexamines what it means to be an Asian American woman. She not only uncovers what is forbidden, hidden, unspoken, wronged, or covered in the “official” history of Asian Americans but also rewrites and reinvents it. Nevertheless, she does not intend to use her story to erase or replace the other versions. Instead, while writing herself and women like her into the history, she has various voices and versions complement and sometimes even contradict one another to form its reality. Furthermore, with her new genre of writing, she writes the dreams, fantasies, and imaginations of Asian American women into the history too. Thus, transgressing various boundaries, Kingston rewrites the history of Asian American women by representing the interaction of multiple voices and versions. In this way, Kingston not only makes herself a woman warrior but does so also for all women who contribute to the struggle

Spatially Coherent Geometric Class Labeling of Images and Its Applications

Automatic scene analysis is an active research area and is useful in many applications such as robotics and automation, industrial manufacturing, architectural design and multimedia. 3D structural information is one of the most important cues for scene analysis. In this thesis, we present a geometric labeling method to automatically extract rough 3D information from a single 2D image. Our method partitions an image scene into five geometric regions through labeling every image pixel as one of the five geometric classes (namely, “bottom”, “left ”, “center”, “right”, and “top” ). We formulate the geometric labeling problem as an energy minimization problem and optimize the energy with a graph cut based algorithm. In our energy function, we address the spatial consistency of the geometric labels in the scene while preserving discontinuities along image intensity edges. We also incorporate ordering constraints in our energy function. Ordering constraints specify the possible relative positional labels for neighbor pixels. For example, a pixel labeled as the “left” can not be the right of a pixel labeled as the “right” and a pixel labeled as the “bottom” can not be above a pixel labeled as the “top”. Ordering constraints arise naturally in a real scene. We observed that when ordering constraints are used, the commonly used graph-cut based «-expansion is more likely to get stuck in local minima. To overcome this, we developed new graph-cut moves which we call order-preserving moves. Unlike «-expansion which works for two labels in each move, order-preserving moves act on all labels. Although the global minimum is still not guaranteed, we will show that optimization with order-preserving moves is shown to perform significantly better than «-expansion. Experimental results show that it is possible to significantly increase the percentage of reasonably good labeling by promoting spatial consistency and incorporating ordering constraints. It is also shown that the order-preserving moves performs significantly better than the commonly used «-expansion when ordering constraints are used as there is a significantly improvement in computational efficiency and optimality while the improvement in accuracy of pixel labeling is also modest. in We also demonstrate the usefulness of the extracted 3D structure information of a scene in applications such as novel view generation, virtual scene walk-through, semantic segmentation, scene synthesis, and scene text extraction. We also show how we can apply this order-preserving moves for certain simple shape priors in graph-cut segmentation. Our geometric labeling method has the following main contributions: (i) We develop a new class of graph-cut moves called order-preserving moves, which performs significantly better than «-expansion when ordering constraints are used. (ii) We formulate the problem in a global optimization framework where we address the spatial consistency of labels in a scene by formulating an energy function which encourages spatial consistency between neighboring pixels while preserving discontinuities along image intensity edges. (iii) We incorporate relative ordering information about the labels in our energy function. (iv) We show that our ordering constraints can also be used in other applications such as object part segmentation. (v) We also show how the proposed order-preserving moves can be used for certain simple shape priors in graph-cut segmentation