The 43th PhD Academic Salon of Translation Studies, 10 December

Last updated:2013-12-04

Topic: Retro-editing: Its Role in English Translations of Contemporary Chinese Literature
Speaker: Shao Lu
Chair: Wang Xiulu

Organizer: Translation Studies Institute, Sun Yat-sen University

Time: 16:30 - 18:00, Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Venue: Room 210, School of Foreign Languages Building 

Abstract:
Abstract: “Retro-editing” refers to editing for content a Chinese work of fiction during the translation and foreign publication process. This concept was proposed by Howard Goldblatt, and eminently applied in his endeavours in translating contemporary Chinese works of fiction into the Anglophonic world. Generally, retro-editing seems an effective translation method in settings which involve the quality of writing and concomitant acceptance by indigenous readers; the role and status of editors at Chinese publishing house; and publishing economics. The translator sometimes also undertakes the role as an editor so that their work can also be regarded as work by the blue pencil or as blue-pencilled work. Under such conditions, a translation should turn out to be the result of struggling and compromising of agents including the author, and the publisher and editor of the ST, and the translator, the publisher and editor of its TT, and the government censor of both the ST and its TT, instead of interacting between the translator, original writer and the ST.

Bio-Note: Shao Lu is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Associate Executive Editor of Translation Quarterly and New Perspectives in Translation Studies. She obtained her PhD in Translation Studies from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2008 and was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University from 2009-2011. Her research interests are in literary translation, fuzzy language in literature and translation, and narratology and the stylistics of fiction. She is the author of Fuzzy Language in Literature and Translation (2011), more than 50 papers, many published in major international and national journals. She is the Principal Investigator of a national-level research project, i.e. the Chinese Ministry of Education Young Researchers in Social Sciences Fund Project 2013:“Goldblatt’s Translator Style in Rendering the Nobel Prize Winning Mo Yan” (Project Code: 13YJC740078), and a Sichuan provincial-level research project in Philosophy and the Social Sciences. i.e. “Comparative Study of the Parallel Chinese and English Texts of Mo Yan: A Cognitive Narratological Approach” (Project Code: SC13WY05).

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