Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 38, Issue 2, 2026

As concise self-contained units of meaning at the interface of artworks and their publics, artwork titles give important insights into what is at stake in mediation in transcultural settings, under particular contextual conditions: stable visual input with cross-over of languages and cultures, and thus activation of multiple frames of reference and expectations for audiences. They are revealing microcosms of morphosyntactic, lexical and pragmalinguistic triggers of spectatorial responses. Implications extend to other mediation forms with similarly unique but more complex characteristics, like interlingual subtitling. Artwork titles are used here to identify features of mediation in these distinct forms of expression, from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective with an underpinning from systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Implications are taken up with the more challenging case of interlingual subtitles.

This article argues that translation inevitably reaches beyond its immediate sociohistorical context by deviating from contemporaneous norms. These deviations may signal and respond to future norms. Spectrality, a theory of time progression and the historical future proposed by Jacques Derrida in 1993, refutes the triumphant, teleological vision of liberal democracy after the collapse of the USSR and suggests that alternative futures already exist. Spectrality theory has gained renewed relevance in recent years, as global uncertainties caused by pandemics and conflicts have destabilized people’s vision of a liberalized future in the post-Cold War era. From a Derridean spectral standpoint, the present study demonstrates that the inexplicable deviations from norms in translation at a certain time may actually adhere to the norms of the future. This paper presents a case study of the 1988 translation of spectral elements in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) in the People’s Republic of China (1949–), immediately before the end of the Cold War. Despite being subject to a Marxist reading in the 1980s, this initial Chinese translation of the spectral figure in To the Lighthouse circumvented the materialist interpretation and foreshadowed the liberalized future in the 2000s, which emerged beyond human control. In addition to conceptualizing patterns and regularities based on adherence to norms to predict the future — an established approach in Descriptive Translation Studies — this paper proposes another way of perceiving the time to come: by examining deviations from norms.

This article examines the 1905 Chinese translation of The Swiss Family Robinson through an ecocritical lens and explores how ecological themes are adapted and reinterpreted within a non-Western cultural context. The study draws on traditional Chinese literary and philosophical concepts such as 山水 shanshui ‘mountain and water’, 风景 fengjing ‘wind-light’, and 无为 wuwei ‘non-action’ to expound the relationship between humans and nature in translation. By comparing the translation with the original text, this study finds that while the original text presents a utilitarian view of nature, the Chinese version accentuates the aesthetics of the island, elevates it to a utopian space, and emphasizes moral obligations toward nonhuman life. Despite its strong ecocentrism, the translation also reveals a predilection for anthropocentrism and positions human beings as superior to animals. The coexistence of both ecocentrism and anthropocentrism suggests that they are not mutually exclusive. The article also contextualizes these shifts within the tumultuous socio-political landscape of the late Qing dynasty and argues that the translation responds to the broader social milieu of the time. By situating ecological consciousness within the practice of translation, this study forges a link between ecocriticism and Translation Studies. It further demonstrates that ecological awareness existed in historical contexts where it had not yet emerged as a dominant framework, which reveals its embeddedness in cross-cultural exchanges.

The impact of foreignized elements on child and adult readers’ comprehension of translated children’s picture books is a complex matter with numerous confounding variables. This study investigates how child and adult readers process foreignized elements in translated Chinese picture books. In an eye-tracking experiment, we found that while foreignized lexical items consistently affected the real-time processing at the initial stage, whether they induced processing difficulty during late-stage processing mainly depended on the context in which they occurred. Our results also showed that children relied more on pictures than adults in reading translated picture books, especially when the text was complicated. Finally, through an attitude test, we found that child and adult readers held different opinions toward foreignization, with children favoring foreignization when the text was relatively easy and adults preferring domestication irrespective of text difficulties.

Typological influences on translating manner-of-motion have been extensively examined, but few studies have analyzed whether the ‘thinking-for-translating’ hypothesis extends to other semantic domains and how factors like directionality and proficiency interact with typology. Using Stosic’s (2020) framework for multi-domain manner analysis, this study, which draws on the Parallel Corpus of Chinese EFL Learners, analyzes a bidirectional corpus of 8008 target texts translating twenty-four manner verbs and adjuncts between Chinese (equipollently-framed) and English (satellite-framed) by learners with varying English proficiency. The results reveal that: (1) Directionality affects manner transfer, with higher manner verb transfer in Chinese-to-English translation and higher manner adjunct transfer in English-to-Chinese translation; (2) English proficiency influences manner transfer, though with small effect sizes; (3) the effects of proficiency on manner transfer differ by translation directionality. These findings expand the ‘thinking-for-translating’ hypothesis to more semantic domains and offer implications for considering directionality and typology in translation training.