I am pleased to share with you that my essay, “The Politics of Translationin The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories“, was recently published by Speculative Insight, an award-winning journal that explores “the breadth and depth of the themes, ideas, and issues of science fiction and fantasy”. You can find the full essay HERE.
Below is the essay’s introduction:
Generally speaking, politics is a set of principles, beliefs and activities associated with the distribution of power and resources. In terms of relations among states, communities, organisations or individuals, the aim of politics is to influence decision-making processes that help to improve someone’s status and/or to increase their power.
In this sense, translation is very much a political act. Translators are traditionally viewed as being invisible and passive, working behind the scenes to transfer information from one language to another. However, in recent decades, researchers are increasingly investigating the politics of translation and the (pro)active role that translators may play in cross-cultural communications.
Specifically, to translate a text from one language (“source”) to another language (“target”) is to make it not only exist but also accessible to readers in the target culture, and therefore empowers that text to impact the target cultural consciousness in myriad ways. Here, “cultural consciousness” is defined as our awareness of how our own distinct culture shapes our beliefs and behaviours while influencing our perception of those from other cultural backgrounds.
More importantly, as a political act, translation makes the perspective of an author – shaped by their experiences and interpretations of the norms and values of the source culture – accessible to readers in the target culture. Such access may affect how these readers engage in conversations not only between the source and target cultures but also within the target culture itself. The fact that an author’s perspective is accessible to readers in other cultures through translation may also affect their reception by readers in their own culture.
A case study at hand is The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (Tor Books, 2022), which features “imaginative stories and compelling essays written by 28 award-winning authors, translators, and scholars”. The book’s dust jacket explains: “Written, edited, and translated by a female and nonbinary team, these stories have never before been published in English and represent both the richly complicated past and the vivid future of Chinese science fiction and fantasy.”
This essay explores the politics of translation in The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, from the book’s inception to its publishing process, its selection and arrangement of stories and essays, the translating approaches discussed by some of the translators, and, finally, the translating strategies and choices revealed in some of the stories. As the following demonstrates, this book is not merely a product of cross-cultural interactions where translators served as neutral intermediaries facilitating communication between people who do not share the same language. Instead, it is part of a purposeful process where its publishers, editors and translators set out to shape the cultural consciousnesses in both the source and target cultures.
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Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 