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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts

Date: 12-14 August 2004

Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea 

Panel 5: Translation and the (De-)construction of National/Cultural Identities

Translation and the Construction of Taiwan's Literary Image

Kenneth S.H. Liu
University College London, UK

Translation of Taiwanese literature into English commenced in the 1960s. It started as cultural exportation with the aid of official or semi-official organisations, aiming to introduce literary products from Taiwan, an island that had long been trying to establish an identity of its own, to the world literary forum. Therefore, translation functioned as a tool for constructing Taiwan’s literary image. By investigating translations of Taiwanese literature from the 1960s to 2000, this study aims to explore how the image that emerged from the English translations represents and positions Taiwanese literature in the world literary system. The problem will be tackled from two directions, “macroscopic” and “microscopic” (Tymoczko 2002). From the macroscopic perspective, this study will look at three dimensions of translation of Taiwanese literature: periodicals, anthologies and monographs. From the microscopic perspective, it will focus on the translation of xiangtu wenxue (nativist literature), a specific literary genre of Taiwanese, to examine how this genre is represented in these publications. With close reading of the texts as well as the “paratext” (Pym 1998) of these translations, this study seeks to demonstrate a link between the translation texts and their context and to show the interplay between them. In the end, the study will illustrate how the social context influenced the translations and how the translations reflected their contexts. It will also reveal how these translations, along with the search for national identity within the island and the struggle to claim a space in the international arena contributed to constructing Taiwan's literary image as an independent entity.

References

Pym, Anthony1(998) Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Tymoczko, Maria (2002) ‘Connecting the Two Infinite Orders: Research Methods in Translation Studies’, in Theo Hermans (ed) Crosscultural Transgressions, Manchester: St. Jerome.


 

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